Runtime
by topographic
Summary: Some strangers in suits have a proposition for Renee...
1. Chapter One

**Chapter One: Things are not always as they seem.**

     I was twenty, and nearly done with my second year at university. My classes were fine, primarily biology and ecology, with one or two really random classes thrown in for good measure. The third Matrix film was almost out and I had Lord of the Rings to look forward to next month. Time seemed to pass in a blur, and now it is easiest to remember it blurred, each day passing without distinction into the next. My first encounter with the agents is the one thing that stands out from the fog, as an ending punctuation.

     They came for me after my last class on Wednesday the week before Revolutions came out. I remember it was that day because I had just purchased tickets online to the premier showing the night before, and as a result was having trouble concentrating on anything else. Thoughts of the Matrix were even intruding into my dreams. Every night for the past few days I had dreamed of agents and pvc-clad rebels and white rabbits. I didn't remember anything distinctly enough to write down, though, and had to be content with the faint memories.

I wasn't the type to really truly think The Matrix was real. I did admit it was possible, but most definitely not probable. I just went along with my life, which admittedly wasn't a bad life, but was boring, mundane. Steady classes at the university, steady work, steady and above all else boring. I watched movies and read books, mainly science fiction and fantasy. Maybe it was escapist. But even then I had no illusions about the lives of the characters I followed. They had troubles equivalent to mine, but in a different direction. And for every hero there were ten thousand extras.

     Anyway, here I was, walking out of class late after picking up a test (which I scored quite highly on, for once). There were three of them, waiting off to one side of the hallway. I looked up from the test and stopped dead. Luckily I was one of the last to come out of the class and thus no one ran into me. They were dressed from their squared-off shoes to their earpieces perfectly, immaculacy, and identically. They weren't physically identical, though very similar, and certainly none of them were the ones from the movies. They all wore sunglasses of course, despite being inside.

_Oh man, they're agents, but they can't be, but they can't not be, but—yarghn. _My mind slipped a gear or something as I stood there, blinking stupidly and creasing the paper in my hand as I gripped it too tightly. The agents step towards me as one.

"Miss Ackerman?" the leading agent says. I managed to shut my mouth and nod once, sharply. "Could you come with us, please? We have a proposition for you."

"Wha- who are you?" My voice came out rushed as I tried to focus, faced with something that by all sense shouldn't exist.

A ghost of a smile touched the lead agent's face. "I believe you know the answer to that question, Miss Ackerman. We are agents." I open my mouth to ask another question, but he anticipates it correctly and answers before I can ask it. "Yes, that kind of agents. Will you come with us now?" He pauses, waiting for me to speak.

A million thoughts rush through my head, leaving it curiously empty. Sure, I had fantasized about something like this happening, for any and all of the books and movies and television shows I liked. But here it was happening, in really real life, and I could think of nothing original or smart to say. "Okay."

My hands drop to my side, still clutching the test paper, as the lead agent motions me forward and turns slightly. I step towards him, suddenly and acutely conscious of my flip-flops and scruffy t-shirt. The two supporting agents moved aside and drop behind me. The three shepherd me down the hallway and out the back door, which opened onto one of the few roads on campus with car access.

I can't help but let a twisted grin show when I see their car, parked right outside the door by the curb. A shiny old black Lincoln that looked as if they had stolen it right off the set of the movie. The lead agent opens a rear door and turns to me, raising his eyebrows slightly above his sunglasses. The other two agents stand to either side, blocking me from any way but forward into the car. I swallow, trying to overcome years of conditioning to not get into any stranger's car. I finally duck down and slide onto the plush leather car seat, dropping my backpack on the seat beside me and buckling the seatbelt automatically. The door shuts with barely any noise, but in my memory it is the slamming close of one life and the opening of another.

I sit quietly as the three agents got into the car. I noted that the one who had been talking to me sat in the back, where Smith sat in the film, and that the slightly taller of the two other agents was driving. The car starts and pulled away from the curb. I was so busy trying to figure out what had just happened that I barely notice as the car turns right and heads towards downtown.

In a few minutes the car pulls into a reserved spot in the parking structure of some nondescript government building. I stay put as the agents get out, the one who had sat shotgun opening my door. I climb out, awkwardly carrying my backpack, and am again surrounded by the agents. I follow the lead one into the building, the other two staying just behind us.

We head in past a receptionist, who barely glances up from her magazine as we walk past her and into an elevator, which opens just as we approach. The agents file in around me and one presses the button for floor nine, the highest floor. There weren't that many tall buildings in Tucson.

The elevator rises directly to our floor and dings, opening. The hallway is beige carpet, the walls white paneling in a subtle grid pattern. We step out and the agent that talked leads us into room 909. This room has the same carpet and paneling as the hall, and is lit tastefully with a number of small light fixtures. A sturdy brushed aluminum table sits in the room, with two chairs, one on either side. On the table sits a slim green folder and beside it on a tray a rather large and scary looking syringe, filled with clear liquid. The exterior wall is all windows from floor to ceiling, looking out over the city and back towards the university. I can clearly see the football stadium, a giant concrete eyesore. I check and see the sky is in fact still blue, and not white or greenish as in the movies. It doesn't reassure me.

The lead agent gestures towards the single chair. "Please sit," he says, as the other agents file around me and take up stations behind me in the corners of the room. He moves to the other side of the table and sits down. I pull back my chair, which makes no sound on the carpet, and slide into it.

He slides the folder towards him, opens it and leafs through a few papers. After a moment he closes it and begins to speak, smoothly and deliberately. "My name is Agent Miller. What I am about to tell you may be slightly difficult to believe. However, with your record online and off," he glances down at the folder, "I believe you will adjust quickly." Miller then takes off his sunglasses and folds them up, placing them carefully on the table. I notice he has very pale blue eyes, like the sky at dawn.

"To put it very bluntly, Miss Ackerman, the fictional setting you know as the Matrix is in all actuality real. Some names and events were made up, but the background, premise (with one or two small exceptions), and much of the design is based completely on reality." His hands move from their place on the table and gesture at the walls with a slight motion. "This reality." Agent Miller pauses, waiting for a response.

I am still as he speaks, barely daring to breathe. When he pauses, I give into temptation and say in my best Keanu imitation, "Whoa."

The agent eyeballs me disapprovingly. "Indeed. The movies, by focusing on the activities of the rebels, destroy their credibility and attempts at recruitment of all but the most gullible through the internet. People who are drawn to question their reality watch the movies, and bring their questions to internet message boards where they are told that it is just a movie and generally made to feel foolish. In addition, these congregations of reality-questioning Matrix fans are much easier to track than the vague whisperings about the matrix before the movies came out. Now, I am telling you this because it relates somewhat to the reason you are here with us today."

"Since the very beginning of the violence between our races, some humans have supported machines. In movie canon, this is alluded to in certain places and mentioned once in The Second Renaissance animated short, which is indeed the true history of the world. What is not mentioned is that some humans, scientists and sympathizers, went with the machines to Zero One. And then the war truly started."

I swallow and sit up straighter in my chair, remembering the scenes from the anime. "Zero One was bombed. Nuked."

"Yes. But the war was foreseen by strategic planning AIs and measures were taken so that our human friends would survive the bombardment. There was a project, started long before true hostilities erupted, the aim of which was to move human minds into machine shells. It was started as a commercial venture to benefit humans with crippling diseases. But the bombs came earlier than expected, and extreme measures had to be taken. They were mostly successful. Of the experiment's first generation, two thirds survived completely intact, and the remainder to varying degrees.

"It was later found most of that third were in some way mentally unfit or unprepared going in, which led to the greatest majority of failures. The procedure has been greatly refined since those days, and now a less than perfect result has an extremely low chance of happening.

"Now we come to the reason I am telling you all of this. It is not just the rebels which recruit. From your internet activities, we know you prefer the side of the machines, and from testing your psyche while asleep that you fit the mental requirements for the process to become an agent. If you so desire it."

As he speaks those last words the world seems to slow. What he had told me in the past few minutes was enough to spend hours considering, and that along with the rapidly shifting worldview was enough that I probably should have gone off to think for a week before saying anything. I didn't have that time. I consider his offer, holding in one hand my life up to now and its future prospects, and in the other the hidden possibilities of what may be. For a long moment the world seems crystallized, holding its breath. Then I breathe out.

"Yes," I say, "I want to be an agent."

"Very well. If you like, we can begin—"

"Wait. First I want to see some proof. You could just be some hoaxers with a hidden camera show, or something," I say in a rush. "And I want to know exactly what I'm getting into and what is going to happen to me."

Agent Miller leans back in his chair and smiles fully for the first time. "Of course. Very reasonable. I see we were correct in making the offer." He picks up his glasses from the table and puts them back on as he turns towards the agent standing behind me in the corner to his right. The agent who drove steps forward to the table. I crane my head up to look at him.

"This is Agent Clark," Miller says, then indicates the other, still standing in his corner. "That is Agent Davis." Turning back to me he says, "Clark, if you would."

Agent Clark raises a hand to his earpiece and then flickers with familiar green light and in an eye-hurting move changes, dwindling into a much smaller and very confused looking man wearing a stained t-shirt and jeans. After a beat this confused guy grimaces and contorts and Agent Clark is standing there again. Just as in the movies, except for being real.

Agent Miller raises an eyebrow at me. "Is that sufficient?"

"Uh, yeah. That's fine." Something clicks inside me, and for the first time I truly and fully allow myself to believe what is happening is really real. Or that I had finally cracked, but it is much more interesting to believe what I had seen was true.

"Then we may now begin. The process of turning a human into an agent has three main components. Here in the matrix, we will insert a string of code designed to transfer you to disk once the proper signal is given. This works in conjunction with a small surgical process performed on your body in the powerplant."

I feel slightly sick at this, realizing my physical body is floating in a vat of pink goo somewhere, being fed dead people. Still, I'm not about to turn back from this. No blue pill for me.

"Once these events occur there is a set period of time in which you must die in the matrix. This triggers the capture program which turns your mind and self into a program, incidentally killing your human body in the process. The body may not be able to live without the mind, but a mind can live very successfully without an organic body."

_Take that, Morpheus_, I think.

"After that, there is a period of code modification and program testing before bringing your consciousness back online as an agent." Miller pauses and waits as I let what he has said sink in.

"Um... will it really be me that comes back as an agent, and not some copy or anything?" I say nervously.

"The twenty-six human-based agents currently active all experience consciousness as continued from their human life and believe they are truly themselves. Including me."

"You—were human once?" I say, eyes wide.

"Yes. Long ago."

"Huh. I would've never guessed."

"Thank you." He pauses for a moment, and when I don't say anything else picks up the scary-looking syringe. I guess there will be no pills for me, red or blue. "If you would please hold out your arm."

This is it. I take a deep breath and stick my arm out across the table. Goodbye, humanity.

 The agent takes my arm and gently turns it over to give the injection. Despite my brave front I am unable to avoid flinching as the needle jabs in and Miller pushes down the syringe plunger. I feel the cold liquid moving into my arm. It seems to take forever for the syringe to empty. He then draws out the syringe, one drop of blood welling up behind the needle. I pull my arm back and wipe the drop off. No more comes. My arm doesn't exactly hurt, but feels strange in some indefinable way. I flex my hand. The sensation fades as the liquid disperses through my blood, but doesn't completely disappear.

"Okay, now what? How long do I have before—you know," I say, swallowing.

"Here you have a choice," says Miller, "The preparations in the powerplant are complete, so we can terminate you right here and now if you like. Or you can first participate in a short mission against the rebels, and be shot incidentally during that mission. Or afterwards, should you survive."

"What would be the mission?" I say. Even if it's guaranteed I will wake up afterwards, I'm not in a hurry to die.

"We have information on a rebel recruitment extraction attempt that will be occurring tonight in Phoenix. Their target is already in our custody and has divulged their meeting place. You would go there at the appropriate time posing as their target and gather information on their current recruitment tactics. We would track you by the code we inserted," he indicates the empty syringe, "and break up their meeting after sufficient data has been gathered."

"Hmm. Didn't you say there was a time restraint or something on when you could do this?"

"Twenty-four hours. Plenty of time."

"Uh, I guess I'll do the mission thing, then. Sounds more interesting than just getting shot right this second." I smile weakly.

Agent Miller nods. "Then it is time to go." He stands, and the other two agents fall in behind him. I stand too, and my eyes find my backpack. I pause, confronted with this remnant of my life before walking into room 909.

I pull it onto the table. "What do I do with this?" Agent Davis reaches across and picks it up, then the three agents move to stand in formation on my side of the table. I notice for the first time I am just a little shorter than Agent Miller, who is six feet at least. I am very tall for a girl, but before this moment the agents had all seemed much taller than me.

"It will be found with your body tomorrow morning. For now, do not worry about it."

How comforting. "Let's just go," I said. "This rebel thing's in Phoenix right? We gonna drive or take a plane or what?"

"No." Miller reached into suit jacket and pulled out a ring of keys.

"Oh." I start to catch on. "Backdoors, huh?"

Miller nods and moves alone towards the door, flipping through the silver keys. He picks out one and sticks it into the lock. The door opens onto the hallway of backdoors, bright glaring white.

I follow Miller into the hallway, Davis and Clark walking behind me. "Wow," I whisper. Goodbye, lingering doubts. To either side the hallway extends out farther than I can see. The never-ending hallway looks even longer in person than it did on film.

We turn right and walk. I count the pale green doors as we go, and get to twenty-three before Miller and the other agents stop. Clark opens a door on our left and I step through in front of him and Davis. It opens onto the ground floor of another office building decorated in neutral colors and grid patterns.

"Welcome to the Arizona sector agency headquarters, Miss Ackerman," says Miller.


	2. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two: Confustication**

     I walk down the hallway, watching the dirty Phoenix skyline out the windows, following the agents. I nearly think of them in my mind as the_ other _agents, and then realize with a slight chill that very shortly they will be the other agents. Miller leads me down the hall and into an elevator. Davis and Clark file in behind me. We rise four floors in silence. The doors open with a clunk and I follow Miller off to the right.

The two other agents turn left, Davis still carrying my backpack. I let it go without looking back.

"So, uh," I say to Agent Miller, "I thought the matrix was supposed to be all shaded green, or something."

"You haven't seen the third movie yet, have you?" he says enigmatically. "Anyway, if the matrix was tinted green, you would be unable to tell, having nothing to compare it to."

"Oh. That makes sense, I guess."

Miller nods, and comes to a stop in front of one of the office doors. He opens it, gesturing at me to enter.

This room is obviously some kind of office. There is a metal desk with an expensive looking black leather chair behind it. On the desk is an even more expensive looking laptop set into a docking station. The cords that should be trailing off it are hidden somewhere. The desk, computer, and chair are the only things in this room, except for another door in the wall left of the one we just came in.

"This is a basic agency office. Discounting regional differences, it is identical to any in all major cities of the matrix." Miller then crosses the floor of the office in a few steps and opens the second door.

Inside is a room about twice as large as the exterior office. This room is a bit more comfortably furnished, with a window looking out over the cityscape and smoggy sky of Phoenix. Below the window is a long thin black lacquer bookcase and minifridge, with a small sink and a few glasses hanging on a rack above the fridge. Hanging beside the window is a flatscreen television, and opposite that a white leather couch. A remote, presumably for the television, is lying on a small black endtable next to the couch. Nice.

"This is a basic agent's private room," says Miller. "It is customizable, to a certain extent, depending on the agent's preference. This specific one does not belong to anyone at the moment. You may wait here for now." He pauses and pulls a small silver cellphone from a pocket. "I and the others will return at nine thirty this evening for your final briefing and transport to the rebel meeting place. If you should need to contact us before then, press 'talk' on this." He hands the cellphone to me. I flip it open. The cell is new and shiny, with a fancy color screen.

 "It is connected to our network," he indicates his earpiece, "and nothing else."

I guess that's a warning to not try and call home. A slight prickle runs down my back. With that, Agent Miller turns and leaves the room, shutting the first door behind him. I don't hear a lock click, but then with the agent tracer serum stuff in me, there isn't anywhere I could run, even if I wanted to, without them finding me.

All right then. Nothing to do until nine thirty and it's only a little after three. I kick my flip-flops off into a corner and drop the cellphone onto the endtable, picking up the remote. I flop down onto the couch, which is quite comfortable; for all that it looks like a chilly block of ice. I start looking over the remote, finding the 'on' button for the television.

The tv clicks on and I start flipping channels. Nothing, nothing, nothi-wait. A guy in a suit clinging to the outside of a high-rise and looking terrified. I put the remote down and with a weak smile settle back to watch The Matrix.

I wake up slowly. Wow, that was a funny dream. Something about agents with syringes and backdoors and... I open my eyes. Uh. Not a dream. After the first movie was over Reloaded had come on, neither movie with commercials, and I had surprisingly fallen asleep during one of the scenes in the real world. Now the screen was dark and so was the room.

"Mpfl." What time is it? I scrabble around for the cellphone. Eight thirty-three. That means one more hour.

My stomach growls, and I suddenly realize that I'm very hungry. I climb off the couch and feel my way over to the door, flipping up the switch for the overhead light. It comes on, and I go raid the well-stocked minibar for snacks. I gobble down an energy bar and have a glass of water, wondering if agents get hungry. I decide maybe, as Miller did say this room was some kind of a standard.

As I sit musing this, the door clicks open. It is (probably) Agent Davis. Hard to tell who exactly if all three aren't together.

"A situation has come up," he says. "The rebels have become aware their potential recruit, whom you were to impersonate tonight, is in our custody. He is currently in interrogation room three, and your presence is requested."

"Uh, all right. Right now? Wearing this?" I am still in the clothes I put on for class this morning, in what might now be a different life. I wasn't wearing skanky clothes or anything, but still felt extremely underdressed in my jeans and t-shirt when compared to the agents' suits.

 "Yes." Davis pauses for a moment. "Your clothes are fine for now. Come." He turns and walks through the outer office and into the hall, me trailing behind him.

We take an elevator down below ground level to get to the interrogation rooms. No opportunities for busting anyone out with a helicopter here. Miller and Clark are waiting in the hall.

"You will be shown into the interrogation room by us," says Miller. "Converse with the young man and attempt to discover where he was to meet with the rebels tonight. We have received information that the location was changed."

Davis speaks. "Should he ask, tell him you were contacted by a rebel called Epeus."

"Are you ready?" Clark speaks this time. The tall one.

"I guess so." I try to recall the frightened and defensive look Neo had before meeting Morpheus in the first movie. "Okay."

Miller nods and Davis reaches out and grabs my shoulder, unlocking and opening the very solid door to the interrogation room. Agent Davis pushes me into the room in front of him, closely followed by Miller and Clark. The quickly and efficiently turn around and leave without speaking. I hear the deadbolt lock click shut, trying to stay in a defensive posture.

"Well, who're you?" I focus and see a guy, quite a bit younger than me, kicked back in a chair in the room, which could be almost a carbon copy of the interrogation room set in the movie. The kid has spiked, purple tipped hair and is wearing a petulant expression along with his black tee-shirt and studded arm bands.

"Uh, I'm Renee," I stammer, thinking quickly, "Did you see those guys? They said they were uh, FBI or something but-" I shake my head. "This is crazy." I take a deep breath and grab the other chair in the room and sit down, all the while trying to act even more nervous than I actually am.

"You got that right." He waves once at me. "I'm Mike. You got any idea why they grabbed you?"

"Well," my brain goes into overdrive, "I was doing some uh, things on the internet that I probably shouldn't talk about in here, and these people contacted me an' wanted to meet. I email them that I would, and a few hours later those guys came busting into my ecology class over at the university and grabbed me."

Mike sat up, interested. "That's kinda what happened to me. You say someone contacted you? Who?"

"Said his name was Epeus."

Mike's eyebrows go up. "Me too. Was 'sposed to meet them tonight, too."

"Yeah? Where? Maybe we woulda ended up at the same place, if it wasn't for them." I point a thumb back towards the door.

"Van Buren and 4th at midnight. Some old building."

"Really? Thanks." With that the locked door clicks and starts to open, making me jump. The agents walk in.

"Good work, Miss Ackerman," says Miller. I nod, get up from the chair and move to stand by them.

A look of dismay comes over Mike's face. "You're with them. You tricked me!" And then his fact turns angry. "Why? They're Agents, and don't pretend you don't know that. Machines! You're betraying your own kind!" With a snarl of rage he lunges out of his chair towards me, hands outstretched and fingers curled like claws.

Agent Clark's hand snaps out and grabs Mike's wrist, twisting it backwards and forcing Mike to a stop. Clark forces him backwards and down into the chair again. "Please remain seated."

Agent Miller opens the door and shows me out, Davis following close behind and Clark a moment later.

"What was all that about?" I say.

"The rebels learned that we had Mr. Mitchell detained and cancelled their activities tonight. We moved to make the best of the situation and discover another of their meeting locations." Miller is impassive as he speaks.

     "But I thought you said you knew where they were meeting."

"We knew where they were going to pick up Mr. Mitchell. Not where they were taking him."

"Oh." I suddenly remember something. "Wasn't I supposed to get caught in some crossfire tonight or something? Is that cancelled too?"

     "Yes. We will have to revert to the initial plan for the release of your mind from that shell." He gestures down the hall. "If you would come this way, we can continue the process immediately."

I nod and follow him. The tingling feeling from the injection earlier today is back, stronger than before. The four of us walk past a few doors before stopping and entering one. It is another interrogation room, empty this time.

Miller pulls out his extremely large gun. He cocks it and points it at me. I suddenly find myself becoming very focused, as one can only be when faced with the business end of any weapon, much less a gigantic Desert Eagle.

"This will hurt quite a bit," says Miller. "It always does, the first time."

He squeezes the trigger twice, and I jerk backward as the bullets hit, falling to the floor. The noise of the gun makes my ears ring. Feeling as if I'm trapped in ice, I put a hand to my chest and manage a look at my fingers. They are stained bright red, and I dully wonder why. Then the pain starts, radiating out from my chest and intensifying until I can't feel anything else. I feel my heart spasm, and then stop. I try to say something witty in response to Miller's 'first time' comment to the three agents standing motionless above me, but I'm just so tired, and then the room fades to black, and then I'm not there anymore.


	3. Chapter Three

**Chapter Three: A Beginning**

"Yoohoo, hey, time to wake up."

I become aware slowly, the memory of pain fading away, the sensation of someone prodding me in the arm taking over. I open my eyes.

I am lying on my back somewhere very, very white. A hospital room? No. Hospital rooms have walls. The past few hours, with emphasis on the last three minutes or so, flash through my mind. Must be some kind of construct. Am I an agent yet? I'd get up and find out, but that would mean trying to move, and the memory of extreme pain makes it very comfortable to just lie here.

Somebody appears, leaning over me. He is wearing a charcoal gray suit and a helpful expression. "Hi there and good morning. I'm the Compiler. Think you can get up now?"

"Uh." I successfully locate my arms and manage to lever up against what must be the floor, since I'm lying on it, after all. "Where am I?"

"This is a programming interface with the outside world. Only accessible under certain special circumstances." He smiles. "Like this one."

As I sit up, I get a look at myself. Wow. My clothes are different from what I had put on this morning. I'm wearing an impeccably tailored suit, and it's the most comfortable thing I've ever worn. I had been getting together an agent costume ready for Halloween, but that was nothing compared to this. My hair is pulled back into a severe ponytail, and I somehow know that the broken ends which had always plagued me would never bother me again. I become aware that I'm also wearing the sunglasses, and from what little I can see in this place I can tell my vision is better than it ever was, even when I wore glasses or contacts. I turn to get a better look at the Compiler and see behind him a small metal table with an open laptop on it. I can't see what is on the laptop's screen, but guess it has something to do with programming.

 I become conscious of a slight weight at my side, and know without looking that it's my gun. Something feels like it's missing, though. I reach my right hand up to my collar. There is an earpiece running out of my shirt collar and dangling down onto my suit. I remember what Smith's earpiece looked like in reloaded and stick a finger down my shirt collar. Yep, it plugged right into me in the little hollow right above my collarbone. For some reason this doesn't worry me in the least. As if I'd done it a thousand times before, I move to put the earpiece in.

"Wait just a sec, there," says the Compiler. "We need to get all your subroutines up and running before you get connected to the agency. And that's what I woke you up for, so why don't we get started."

Woke up? "Uh, how long was I out?"

"Ten hours. Normal for a human mind to sentient program conversion. I was able to transfer you completely to disk and adjust your physical parameters while you were unconscious, but for final mental adjustments and data upload it is better for you to be aware."

"Physical parameters? You changed how I look?"

"Well, somewhat. There's your outfit, of course, and then I cleaned up your body's code. Deleted unnecessary routines, modified existing ones to give you the maximum strength and speed allowable by the system. Didn't really have to change facial features or height as you naturally fall within acceptable agent parameters."

"Oh." How nice. I get to my feet slowly. Now that it's been brought to my attention I can feel the difference in the new me. Before, I had nearly always felt slightly tired and not as strong as I'd like. Now, well, I feel as if I could punch through a concrete wall without bruising. No walls around to test it out, though.

The Compiler nods, satisfied, as I stand up. He moves to stand at the laptop and flexes his hands over the keyboard. "I'll connect your combat and pursuit knowledge files first," he says. "I see you've had some small training in martial arts, and it'll be easier for you to handle and access if I supplant those and add on the new files."

"You sure you're called the Compiler and not Tank?"

"Quite sure." He sighs, shakes his head, and begins typing at lightning speed. "That movie. If you insist on saying 'I know kung fu' after this, I'll be forced to work some nasty surprise into your code."

"I'll be good."

He pauses and looks up from the keyboard. "I hope you're ready, because here we go." He presses the enter button.

It was that feeling you get when you everything clicks and you suddenly realize what's going on, times a million. It overwhelms my year of Tae Kwan Do training, and I realize just how little I knew. Hand to hand combat, the finer points of takeoff and landing when jumping 'impossible' distances, the use of guns (especially the one in its holster by my side), driving and piloting any vehicle, and exactly how to dodge bullets was now in my head like it had been there forever, and moreover as if I had learned it all perfectly from the ground up, muscle memory included. I knew with all certainty that I would make my first jump. To do otherwise would be contrary to my programming, to myself.

I also realize that with this influx of data has come the knowledge of how to transfer myself into and out of a host within the matrix. It is quicker than it looks in the effects shots of the movies. Slightly over a second, at the most. I also now know that here I am not overwriting a host but am just myself, something impossible anywhere _but _here. And with all this comes the sure knowledge that getting killed in a host will sting a bit, but not be the all-encompassing pain that I remember from back in that interrogation room. And it doesn't last. All pain and trauma stays with the host, with a full physical code restoration in the next transfer. The mental information continues straight through, though, and the slight dissonance of suddenly having your sunglasses back on and no wounds can come as a bit of a shock in the heat of battle. I realize the whole knuckle- and neck-cracking regime in the movie isn't just to give Morpheus more time to stand up, but to bring the physical and mental back together.

"Looks like that batch of files went through just fine," says the Compiler, distracting me from my study of what's gotten into my head. "We can go on to the more delicate manipulations now." He presses a few more keys on the keyboard. "This will clean up and adjust your present physical movements and mental processes to agent standard."

He presses the enter button before I have time to say anything. I confess to a slight tremor at this, wondering if I'll still be me after the information goes through. I wouldn't stop him, though, even if I could. The first thing I remember liking about the agents in the movies was just how smooth and identical their motions were. And the whole everyone completing everyone else's sentences didn't seem like it would be so bad.

In fact it seems natural now, such that I can't think of how it could otherwise be. This data erasure and change was much more subtle and complete, I realize. It is already over. My posture changes ever so slightly, and when the Compiler sees this, he smiles. I now have the attitude to go with the suit.

"That's gone over perfect," he says. "You're nearly a full agent."

I smile ever so slightly as he says this. I am thinking much clearer now than I had been a few moments ago. No residual human frailties of vagueness and regret and discomfort. I find I am now unconcerned about the details and worries of my past life which had earlier seemed so critical. It is just that. Past, and relegated to certain data files which I needn't access without specific reason.

"Now we just have some final instructional and assignment-specific ops files, and then I'll get you connected to the agency mainframe and you can transfer on over to your sector headquarters."

"Where am I to be assigned?" I say. My voice is smooth and confident, as it will always be from now on.

The Compiler pulls up a file on his computer. "Northern California. The mainframe doesn't like to put agents made from humans where they're likely to encounter anyone who used to know the human part. But also somewhere not too foreign." He waves a hand at me. "To take advantage of any residual special cultural knowledge. And there's a new team of agents being formed in the North Cal sector right now that you'll be part of. It's just easier on everyone involved, this way."

I nod. Northern California is a quite acceptable posting.

The Compiler is typing at his keyboard again. "Here we go. This'll be information on agency objectives and protocol." He looks up meaningfully. "Your purpose."

Something from the old me comes to the surface briefly. 'I know because I must know. It is my purpose.' I had always liked the Keymaker.

 "Let's see. You'll also get names and visuals of all known rebels and exiles active in your sector. And general and specific street maps. Also methods of interaction with human law enforcement. And your name. That kind of stuff." He presses the enter key and the information appears in my program.

My old human life and self dwindles off into almost nothing. The name Renee Ackerman is disconnected from who I am as my primary reason for existing rises to the surface. Attempt to terminate rebels and potential rebels unless able to convert them to our side. Track down and pacify dangerous exiles. Protect the matrix. It is a comforting mantra.

"Feels good to know exactly why you exist, doesn't it?" the Compiler says conversationally as he taps a few final buttons.

"Yes."

"Well, that's it. Congratulations, you're an agent now. You can put your earpiece in now, Agent Lee."

I straighten slightly as I hear my name spoken aloud for the first time. And it is my name. My full name. It is bizarre to think it had ever been anything else.

I bring my right hand up, curl my earpiece around the top of my ear and plug it in without any wasted motion or missteps. It fits perfectly, of course, and I know there is no way for it to fall out unless I take it off on purpose. Which is unthinkable. As I lower my hand, I instantly feel connected to something much greater than myself. A two way connection. I realize that I have somewhere I need to be.

"Thank you," I say to the Compiler.

"Goodbye," he says.

I put my hand to my ear in the classic agent pose and transfer myself away and into the matrix.


	4. Chapter Four

**Chapter Four: Big City  **

The Northern California sector headquarters is located in downtown San Francisco. It is a challenging first assignment. The bay area has a much higher concentration of rebels, due to the fertile recruitment grounds for young hackers in the high schools of San Jose and Silicon Valley, and a larger than normal percentage of people 'with a splinter in their mind'. This place seems to attract them. The city additionally has a large population of exiles and a tendency towards minor glitching. All of which means steady work for us agents.

The world snaps into focus as I transfer in to a human security guard patrolling the agency building. The security guard is alone, but even if there had been other humans around they would not have noticed my arrival for more than a brief moment. This is due to a handy little subprogram built into the pods at the power plant that does not let humans put memories of 'impossible' actions by agents into their long-term memories. Distract them, and humans forget.

Except for rebels, broadcasting from their ships in the sewers. They just run, if they're smart. If they don't, they die.

I turn and head directly for the elevator in a building I've never been in before in my life, as a program or human. Building schematics were included in the last information upload.

I'm on my way to the third floor meeting room, to meet the other two agents in my group, along with the six other agents, two groups, who work in this sector. A dramatic and steady increase in disruptive activity in this area throughout the last few years precipitated the assembly of a new team.

Through my earpiece, my link to the agency mainframe I already know the names and faces of my fellow agents. I am the only one among them that used to be human. My partners will be Agent Williams and Agent Harris. Harris is also a new agent, one born a program. He is only a few weeks old. But then, I am technically only a few hours old. Williams will be the leader. He has been transferred from assignment in another sector, and is quite an experienced agent. He has been around through a number of cycles and reloads of the matrix.

As soon as I think this, I realize that there is indeed a cycle of ones as was shown in the movies. I resolve not to become like Smith, in either movie. I briefly wonder what will happen in Revolutions and how much will be real, and find with a shock I have access to that movie through my link to the agency. Naturally, programs were involved in the entire process of the Matrix franchise, controlling from behind the scenes exactly what the Wachowski brothers were allowed to show.

For a brief second I hesitate, tempted, and decide I'd rather wait and watch it the theater in a week's time. I knew the real history of the matrix anyway, now.

The elevator stops with a ding. The door opens and I walk down the hall, decorated just the same as the other agency buildings I visited in Arizona. I turn and open the door to the meeting room. All eight other agents are there, calmly awaiting my arrival. A rebel dropped into this room, (if stopped from freaking out and running like hell) wouldn't be able to tell any of us apart at first, second, or even third glance without some kind of a scorecard. It is a common misconception among rebels that agents are identical. Not true. We all look very similar, certainly, and wear identical suits and sunglasses, of course, but there are slight differences in height and build.

The two older teams are seated at a large oval table made of dark wood. Williams and Harris stand at the side nearest the door, watching me and waiting for me to take my place to Williams' right. Harris stands at his left. I nod in acknowledgement to the other agents as I move forward and fall into position. Everything feels absolutely perfect.

"Good morning, agent." Agent Thomas speaks. He is team leader for the oldest team of the three, and thus the head agent in this sector. The two other agents of his team are Agent Martin and Agent Lewis. The other team leader is Agent Moore, the only other female agent working out of this agency. Her partners are Agent Hall and Agent Taylor.

"Welcome to the agency, Agent Lee," says Agent Moore. "You are adjusting well? I am sure you will be happy here."

"Thank you, and yes," I say, "I am sure I will."

"Now that we have all met," says Thomas, "You three will be going out on a short assignment, to acquaint Lee with our methods of operation."

I put a hand to my ear as information streams in over my earpiece. An exile going by the name of Joe has been making a nuisance of himself in Golden Gate Park. We are to asses the level of threat to the matrix his actions are creating and either warn, detain or terminate the exile based on that threat level. Well within my new abilities.

"It will be done," says Agent Williams. He has a calm, steady voice, but then we all have calm, steady voices.

The three of us, Williams, Harris, and I, turn in unison. I open the door and we leave the room. The mission is not critical at this point, so we will take our car, the standard black Lincoln, to the park rather than transfer hosts.

In the hall, Williams and Harris pause and turn to face me.

"You used to be human," says Harris.

"My past life is irrelevant," I say, "I am a program. I have a purpose. I am an agent of this system."

"Your creation and assignment here was unexpected, but-" says Harris.

"Know that you are welcome and now our equal, despite your beginnings." says Williams. He smiles ever so slightly. "You will adjust quickly."

"I will." The conversation is over. I have a feeling that I have passed some test.

We go directly to the elevator and file in. The parking garage for the agency is below the main building, so as to conserve space.

I do not need to be told to sit in the front passenger seat when we get to the car. The protocols the Compiler transplanted into my brain included exactly who does what and who sits where when Williams, Harris, and I are working together. We have to move as a team, without confusion, in any and all circumstances.

Harris gets into the driver's seat and Williams into the back. Harris starts the car and we pull up out of the garage and into a foggy San Francisco morning.

I stare intently through my sunglasses and out the front window as we head towards the park. The drifting white fog adds another layer of unreality to the world. Humans walk down the sidewalk and drive around us in their cars, going about their lives, unquestioning, oblivious to the agents who drive past them with a purpose.

Amazing, isn't it, Harris says over our earpiece link. Anyone glancing in through the car windows would just see three people in suits, completely still and staring straight ahead.

 Yes. I respond in the same manner, though until Harris had transmitted those words, I had not known it was possible. I was still busy trying to fully integrate and explore the files uploaded into me by the Compiler. It's as if I see the world through new eyes. And I see_ everything._ That is true, too. I can get immediate in-depth information on anything I see through my link to the agency.

Amusement comes in over our link from Williams in the back seat. New agents are so entertaining, he says. Don't worry, you both will get used to it after a while.

I hope not, says Harris. I feel connected. I like it.

I agree with him, and that thought is transmitted through our link.

Harris turns into the entrance of the park and stops the car by the curb. The exile is close. A constant stream of reports and updates on the disturbance to the matrix he is causing comes through my earpiece. Car doors open and shut, and I take my place to the right and slightly behind Williams.

I put two fingers to my earpiece. "The exile is eighty-five meters north of this position," I say out loud. My programming tells me is best to communicate certain information out loud in situations like this, if there is enough time to.

We step forward in unison, striding purposefully over the grass in our shiny black shoes. There are a few humans around us in the park, but they take no notice of us and I take no notice of them. I am focused in on the disturbance signals radiating from a group of humans on the other side of a row of small trees.

The disturbance signals are markers that humans give off when they see something contrary to their idea of reality. The most critical signals are connected to rebel activity; jumping across rooftops, disappearing into phones, and any type of terrorist activity.

I briefly access the history files of the agency on a whim as we are walking, and find that September eleventh was a major headache of a day for all agents of the matrix. Disturbance signals going off everywhere, all because of something that had absolutely no rebel activity whatsoever associated with it. I am not especially surprised to find this out. Humans will be humans.

I drop the file back into the agency system as we come around the row of trees. There is a small crowd gathered, watching a nondescript person in a ruffled green poet shirt and ripped jeans. He is doing card tricks. But not by slight of hand. The exile Joe is manipulating the matrix with his tricks, and that is not allowed under the terms of the Truce. He could have gone off and done something productive, but here he is, causing a disruption.

He looks up from his cards, stares straight at me, and cracks a smile. His eyes don't seem to quite point in the same direction, but he stares all the same.

"That's all for today, folks. It looks like these nice people want to have a talk with me," the exile says as he shuffles the cards and slides the pack up one of his sleeves. The crowd notices our presence for the first time, and disperses rather quickly. Being seen as human authority figures has its uses.

The exile leans down and scoops up a top hat with a wide purple silk band sitting by his feet. He had obviously been using it as a collection plate. The hat clinks and rustles audibly. The exile, still staring at me (more or less), scoops this money up and makes it vanish up his other sleeve. Then he puts the top hat on.

Agent Williams steps forward, closing the last few meters, Harris and I following close behind.

"What you are doing is not permitted," says Williams. In most cases only the lead agent talks to our targets.

"Hey, I'm sorry, a guy's gotta make a living," the exile says, "She's new, right?" He is still staring at me. Then he winks.

I become acutely aware of the gun hanging by my side. I would very much like to shoot this exile. I keep my face as emotionless as possible, and as an agent, that's very easy, and very emotionless.

"That is not of your concern," says Williams. "If you persist in breaking the rules we will be forced to terminate you."

The exile finally stops trying to concentrate on me, and instead focuses his attention on Williams.

     "Aw, man, what about the Truce? It was harmless, I swear." The exile turns his hands up helplessly.

"You are breaking the terms of the Truce. This is your final warning. Break them again and we will terminate you. Now hand over the cards."

The exile pauses for a long moment, and then sighs. "Oh, fine." The cards appear in his left hand. "Take them."

This is where I come in. I reach forward and pick up the deck, watching carefully for any malicious move by the exile. I pass the deck to Williams as I step back into place. He slips the deck of cards into a pocket.

"That is all," says William. "For now."

The exile tips his hat at us, cracks another nervous smile, and backs away slowly. Then he turns and runs. The three of us stand still and watch him go.

I catch Harris' eye as we turn and start walking back towards the car. Are all exiles like him? I ask over our earpieces.

Only the crazy ones.

How nice. I remember something strange that I can't quite find in my files from Williams' conversation with the exile. What is the Truce?

Williams answers me. You were a fan of the movies. Have you accessed the third one yet?

No... And I'd like to wait these last few days and see it for the first time in a theater. To give my former life a kind of final closure.

Ah. The Truce is somewhat involved with the third film. You must be subconsciously blocking spoilers for the movie. He is obviously (to another agent, at least) amused by this.

Hmm. I had thought my former life as a human would not influence me now that I was an actual agent. All the more reason for closure. Will it impact my performance to stay like this until next Wednesday?

I can tell Williams is thinking hard. Probably not. Due to your circumstances I think you can have a little leeway. Though I would suggest reviewing the true history of the matrix. It is likely you will be exposed to very broad spoilers along the way. Remember, the movies do not show the world exactly as it is.

Yes, I know. And I did.

The three of us reach the car. Harris studies a parking ticket that has appeared on the car in the short time it has sat there.

Williams notices the parking ticked and touches his earpiece briefly. There is a flicker and the ticket is not there. Whoa, déjà vu.

We should all go to the opening together, in our normal attire, Harris suggests impulsively. Humans would just assume we are dedicated fans.

An interesting suggestion, says Williams as we get into our car and start driving back to the agency.

I think it would be fun, I say over the earpiece link. And it would enforce the idea that the matrix is just a movie. Like those power-aid ads do.

Well, fine, says Williams from the back seat. If the mainframe agrees it is a good idea, we can go. I've put in a request.

Happiness from Harris and me floods our network. It seems as if we're both Matrix fans, as well as matrix agents.

"You were assigned an office, Lee?" asks Williams out loud.

I focus, and realized that I have been. "Yes," I say, and call up a schematic of our building. "The office to the right of yours. Room 608." Williams' office is in 606, with Harris just to the left in 604.

Williams nods. "Very good. When we return to the agency you should visit it and request anything you feel you need from the mainframe."

"I will," I say.


	5. Chapter Five

**Chapter Five: Shadows of the Past**

The fog starts to clear on the way back to headquarters. It is turning into quite a lovely day. Humans are out all around us, going about their lives. I probably should have been overwhelmed with the new knowledge and feelings of being an agent, but just somehow wasn't. Something in my programming, probably. I didn't need to be overwhelmed, and so I wasn't. I could use some time to think, though.

Harris parks the car and I get out. The three of us take the elevator to the sixth floor. Harris and I go to our offices, while Williams leaves to confer with the other two team leaders about our encounter with the exile.

Office 608 is identical to the room I was left in back in Phoenix, a day and a lifetime ago. The only exception is that there is a window in the first room as well as the second. The front office with its desk and laptop, which I now know is connected to the agent core network, as well as the human internet. I know how to use and program basically anything on both networks that I need to. And I know a lot, since I have been made into an agent of the more technical type, I realize for the first time with a bit of a surprise. Still assimilating information, I guess.

The windows in the first and second room look out towards the Golden Gate Bridge. It is visible only part of the time, through the fog and clouds that sweep over the headlands of San Francisco. I had come here once as a human. The summer before last, to look at colleges. I had loved it here, but gone instead to the university back in Tucson, close to my family.

It is something of an effort to recall these things. I know I do not need to think about my old life to perform my function as an agent, but standing here and looking out on a scene I first saw with my human mother I feel slightly wistful. Another unneeded memory and related emotion. What is wrong with me? I turn away from the window and survey my office.

I know much more about it, now. The flat-screened television picks up surveillance cameras as well as cable, the fridge is there because we do get hungry and thirsty if we stay too long in one body without transferring to reset our physical condition codes. I send in a request for the fridge to be stocked with suitable foods.

The bookcase is empty, aside from a few philosophy and evolution books. I notice a leather-bound copy of Simulacra & Simulation and smile. I cannot think of anything extra that I would need in either room. The old me had been a book nut and a bit of a packrat, but now things are different. There is nothing else I need but to fulfill my purpose. To be an agent.

I step back into the first room, my working office, sit down in my black leather chair, and turn on the computer. It boots very quickly and prompts me for a password. I enter my password without pause, even though a second ago I hadn't realized I had one.

I find without surprise that the computer is running a version of Windows. Bill Gates is a program working with the mainframe, after all. Though the buggy Windows software made and used by the humans is quite different from what we are supplied with. Our lower-level non-sentient computer systems have the advantage of nearly a thousand years of upgrading and refinement from the ones used at the peak of human civilization, though here in the matrix they must look identical to the ones sold in human stores.

I open a browser window and access the agentnet system. It is primarily a much more extensive and constantly updated version of the knowledge files downloaded into me by the Compiler. My files were primarily just for the Northern California Sector, and these are for the entire matrix.

Remembering the movies, on a whim I request files on the Merovingian. I am mildly surprised when they actually come up. He doesn't look exactly like the guy in the movie, though I can recognize some similarities. Mostly in looking French and completely full of himself. Has estates all over the matrix, with current headquarter location given as a restaurant in Toronto. No need to worry about him too much, then. There are standing orders attached to the file to detain him for questioning if possible. Hmm.

I remember something from before having to do with the movie and the other side of the bay. The freeway chase sequence for Reloaded was shot in Alameda. I check the agency records and find that my agency had someone on hand at the filming, ostensibly as a representative of some government group. Ha. I think momentarily that it would have been fun to be there for the filming, and then realize how silly this is. I am an agent, and not in the movie.

These flashes of my previous life's desires are getting disturbing.

I mentally shrug and pull up a browser connected to the human internet. It is one of my jobs to regularly patrol internet messageboards, communities, and chat rooms for potential rebels, generally by scanning existing messages. I also post inflammatory messages and mark whoever responds in certain ways for surveillance. This actually works, believe it or not.

It is strange. Some of these boards I frequented _before_, and had even posted to one or two. It was different to read the theories and ideas and speculation now, knowing what was true and what wasn't, and purposefully clouding what was.

When finished with that task for the moment, I review briefly the history of the matrix, or at least as much as I can recall. There is one curiously inaccessible spot in my files. I suppose it has to do with the events leading to the end of Revolutions.

Before that point the history follows very closely the timeline and history shown in the movies and anime. The files on the second renaissance are even grislier and more violent in real life. Then that ends, and the cycles of the matrix begin. One or two failed test runs, and then six versions beginning and ending with the emergence of the anomalies. The Ones.

Then ...something happens. An uneasy coexistence after the seventh reload. Exiled programs were allowed to try and find their own purpose, or else live as normal humans within the matrix. And only terminated if they interfered with the overall running of the matrix. This references the Truce I heard Williams talking about. And the rebels were not totally and utterly obliterated, but instead left to rebuild. And certain humans were released, the ones that chose consciously to reject the matrix. They were shipped to Zion and not allowed back in. The humans there are working with the machines to clear the skies, though as of now there has been little progress. When humans mess something up, they do it good.

And another project was started around this time, to further examine choice and coexistence. A list of names of participants with _Lee, Agent_ at the bottom.

The peace did not last. Zion underwent a schism. Many were happy to just finally be free and at peace. But a contingent of rebels within the rebels, extending up to the highest authorities of Zion, insisted the war could not be over until the matrix and all AI was destroyed. One night they ran for it, taking enough ships and equipment to build a new city, somewhere else. They even stole the prophecy and made it their own.

It is these rebels agents primarily deal with. They jack in and try to free minds that want out before they are released to Zion by the system. The cycle of growth and destruction continues, though at a less escalated level. Though a new integral anomaly has not yet appeared since the balance of peace was disrupted, so perhaps something really has changed.


	6. Chapter Six

**Chapter Six: The Finer Points of Interrogation**

Williams, Harris, and I have intercepted a single rebel's cellphone call to a group of rebels, the rest of the crew of her ship. It appears that they are in the first stages of trying to arrange a meeting with a potential rebel. Through either a lucky break on my part or carelessness on the rebels, I am able to intercept the cellphone communication and manage to learn that the potential rebel's handle is 'Jkr3x7'. He or she had been somewhat active in hacking communities, but had also been visiting matrix sites and chatrooms since around May. Not posting much of anything, though, and as a result staying just below the parameters required for us to be alerted.

I start a search running in the afternoon for internet users in the bay area acting under that name, and come up with a few ISP numbers.

I then hand the numbers over to Harris, whose responsibilities tend towards coordinating with human institutions—the police, the government, the media. And internet service providers. A scan through their databases, crosschecked with the activities on the internet that Jkr3x7 had been involved in, and we had an address. Along a name. Sean Levan, a freshman student at San Jose University who still lived at home with his parents.

With that information, I prepare a folder on Mr. Levan's dodgier activities on the internet. Harris makes up a warrant so we have a superficial reason to collect Mr. Levan for questioning. This is all given to Williams, who has been reviewing logs of our target's activities on and off the computer as an aid in questioning.

Seven in the evening and the three of us were back in the Lincoln, driving south into San Jose. We didn't have any problems with the traffic, due to some subtle programming in our cars that caused alteration of the traffic flow patterns to always give Harris the right of way. As he also didn't have to worry about the speed limit, we travel south much faster than would have been possible otherwise.

Why don't we just transfer to near the location? It would save time. I ask Williams, though I suspect I know the answer. Sometimes it is better to hear things out loud, or at least over my earpiece, than it is to sift through my files and bring up the answer myself. Also, I was getting bored just sitting here. Though not precisely bored, since the drive would have been classified as hair-raising had I not had an agent's reactions.

It would save time, yes, but then we would be stuck using whatever car we could find, and this one has much more authority when picking up movie fans. And he is a fan, right, Lee?

Yes. He is exhibiting patterns consistent with a fan of the movies. Will he be offered a release to Zion?

He is borderline for the release program, but I think it unlikely. The sum of his activities indicates a strong attachment to this world.

If he is borderline, then seeing us may tip him over the edge, says Harris.

It may. But remember his contact with the rebels renders him ineligible for the release program, says Williams, Once he is tagged and released, it will be up to him to either lead us to the rebels or go back to his normal life.

Harris slows the car as he drives down the ramp off the highway and onto the surface streets. It is just starting to get dark, the sun going behind the clouds near the western horizon. He drives quicker than the human traffic on surface streets, too. The lights all turn green right when he needs them to, and we never gets stuck behind anybody. I do notice him cutting off all the SUVs that he can, with a bit of an evil thrill coming over our earpiece connection. Everyone has a hobby, I guess.

And then we are there. A small and unassuming house in a decent neighborhood that by my Tucson real estate sensibilities would probably sell for a ridiculous amount of money. As Harris pulls to a stop in front of the house I notice a face appear in a second-story window. Behind him on the wall of his room is a poster for The Matrix, and I see the edge of a glowing computer screen. It is him. Mr. Levan. Our target. I recall all the awful Matrix fanfiction that I have read, or at least skimmed, that had a situation like this. Mwa ha ha.

Williams picks up the warrant and file. Ready? Harris and I send him our assent, and we step out of the car in unison. The face disappears from the window for a moment, and then one eye reappears at the edge of the glass. I feel disturbance indicators coming from his over my link to the agency. His computer screen has gone black, with green text popping up. The rebels know we're here, and are trying to warn him. Too late. He knows, or at least guesses what we are, and he is scared and not believing what his gut is telling him, which is that there are indeed three agents walking up to his front door. Like I was, a few short days ago.

At the door, Harris steps up and rings the doorbell, then moves back to his place to the left of Williams. After a moment the porch light comes on and the door opens. A balding, middle-aged man that has software programmer written all over him opens the door. Sean Levan's father.

"Mr. Levan?" says Williams, "We are from the Federal Bureau of Investigations." He holds up the warrant. "We need to speak with your son and take him in for questioning."

"What, Sean? What's he done?" The older Mr. Levan is obviously confused, but unable to disobey the conditioning of years of living in an authority-respecting society and the tags on an agents' program that makes humans fully hooked up to the system tend to obey them.

"Yes, Sean. He is running a network used to distribute music and software files illegally. Among other things." This was even true. But then, nearly everyone targeted by rebels had at least a few downloaded mp3s. The agency even works to perpetuate music downloading, as it is quite handy as a trumped-up charge.

"Uh, just a minute," says Mr. Levan, "Come in, why don't you." He opens the door all the way, and we file in, Williams leading. Harris' and my main job right now is to be silent and slightly menacing figures in dark sunglasses, and to grab the kid if he tries to run for it.

"I'll send him right down." The older Mr. Levan disappears up the stairs. I hear the conversation between him and his son quite clearly as he tries to get Sean to open the door and come down, but then due to their volume I probably would have even if I didn't have the superior hearing that I do now.

Eventually a door opens and our target appears at the top of the stairs, his father close behind. He has a look on his face that is somewhere between sullen and nervous. He is wearing jeans and a faded black t-shirt from some band's tour. He swallows, taking in our greenish-brown suits and ties and our angular sunglasses. Goaded by his father, he walks down the stairs, taking extra time and gripping the handrail. He is sweating, confused by the message that just showed up on his computer and our appearance.

"Sean Levan?" says Williams. The boy nods. "You will need to come with us for questioning on your illegal music file trading." The boy reaches the bottom of the stairs.

Harris and I move forward to stand to either side of him, faces impassive. He flinches as I handcuff him and put a hand on his shoulder to walk him towards the door. The boy's father starts to speak and then stops as Williams shoots him a look and follows us out the door, closing it behind him. The sun has just set, and it seems in the flat light that all color has leached out of the world.

Mr. Levan does not resist as I push him down into the back seat of the car. No one talks, at least out loud, as we drive back towards the agency with Mr. Levan.

It appears the rebels managed to contact him, I say through my earpiece, I noticed green text show up on his computer screen as we drove up.

Yes, says Williams, But other than that it went well. He is confused, and unsure as to what is really happening. That may work to our advantage.

A relatively short time later we pull up at the agency headquarters. Night has fully fallen, and as Mr. Levan surely notices, we are still wearing our sunglasses. And we don't look stupid, which is hard (at least for humans) to pull off when wearing sunglasses at night. This time we park in the underground garage at a spot right next to the elevator, for easier transport of Mr. Levan. I notice one of the other agency Lincolns is gone. A quick check and I find the other two teams are out; one with the car checking a possible glitch near Santa Cruz (quite a hotspot for glitches) and the other on the trail of a dangerous exile in Sacramento.

Harris and I manhandle Mr. Levan out of the car and into the elevator, going down a few levels to the interrogation rooms. We put him in room number one and leave, locking the door. It is always best to leave someone alone with their thoughts for some time before interrogating them. Lets them get good and nervous. And for potential rebels that are movie fans, lets them notice how the room they are sitting in is identical to the one in the film, and think about what we look like compared to the movie.

Harris and I wait by the elevator for Williams. He did not come down the first time with us so as to put a little more distance and fear into Mr. Levan when he is interrogated. Again, like in the movie, Williams will do the talking and we will stand around and look menacing. And physically restrain him when it is time for him to be bugged. And he will be bugged, no matter what he says or does under interrogation.

The first movie was incredibly accurate on its own as to what goes on in an interrogation, and after it came out agents were ordered to follow it as exactly as possible, so as to create the maximum amount of mental dissonance in interrogation subjects who know The Matrix, if not the matrix.

Once a few minutes have passed, we enter the room. Williams leads, carrying the file on Mr. Levan, and Harris comes in last. Mr. Levan is sitting in his chair, hands gripping the armrests so tightly that his knuckles are white. Harris and I move to stand in the corners of the room, blocking Mr. Levan from the door. Williams places the file on the metal table and sits down in the other chair. He very carefully and deliberately opens the file and flips through the pages inside.

"You've been... very busy, Mr. Levan," says Williams, "With all that time you had to run your illegal file server, I would have thought you'd be able to find some time to score higher than a..." Williams glances down at one of the papers in the file, "'D' on that last Economics exam."

Mr. Levan whimpers slightly.

Williams closes the file and stares levelly at the scared young man. "We know you have been contacted by a... certain organization. Specifically, a man called Ajax." He removes his sunglasses, folds them, and places them to one side on the table, keeping eye contact with Mr. Levan. Williams has very intense light blue eyes, like all of us.

"This man is a terrorist, plain and simple," says Williams. The word terrorist has extra meaning now, and we play it to full advantage. "Help us get to him, and these unfortunate charges," he drops his eyes briefly to the file folder, "Will be dealt with. Otherwise..." Williams folds his hands in front of him on the table. "Well?"

I can see Mr. Levan just itching to respond as in the movie, curling his hands into fists. But he stops before going through with it. He is plainly thinking that all this is completely crazy.

"No," he says. "I don't know what's really going on here, but I do know I ain't talking to you. I want a lawyer."

Williams sighs, and slowly puts his sunglasses back on. "I am sorry to hear that, Mr. Levan. But tell me, have you ever heard of the PATRIOT Act? "

Mr. Levan is obviously confused. This isn't how it's supposed to go. He bites his lip, and doesn't say anything.

"No? No matter. What it basically says is that due to your terrorist connection, we can do anything we like with you, and there is nothing you can do about it." Williams raises his eyebrows, and initializes the mouth melting program. A simple and minor manipulation of code. It won't do to have him screaming while he's being bugged, after all, and easier to convince his mind later that it was all a dream, if something so unreal happens.

It takes Mr. Levan a moment to realize what is happening, though he has been waiting for it ever since he was manhandled into the room. He reacts predictably, trying to scream and failing, and scrabbling at the place where his mouth should be. He jumps up out of his chair and into a crouch, totally on the defensive.

Get him, Williams sends over our link. Harris and I move forward. Mr. Levan flails out at us, and I catch one of his fists in my hand, and squeeze. I feel small bones crack beneath my fingers. Oops. We pull him onto the table as he struggles.

Williams appears at our side, taking a small metal case out of his jacket pocket and pulling out a single bug. It is much smaller than the one in the movie, though as he holds it over Mr. Levan it shifts in exactly the right way, into something that looks like a miniature crawfish crossed with a metallic octopus. It serves as a trace and monitoring program within the matrix, and is also packed with a few select programs; to knock him out and interfere with the rebel's trace program should they give him the red pill without removing the bug first.

Williams drops the bug onto Mr. Levan's face. I shift one hand to grip his forehead, holding his head still as the bug crawls right up Mr. Levan's nose, for variety.

His eyes bug out and he spasms as the bug anchors itself in his nasal cavity. Once secure, the bug releases a fast-acting soporific and Mr. Levan passes out, to everyone's relief. His eyes roll back and he relaxes onto the table. Harris and I release our grips on him and straighten up. Agent Williams in turn ends the program keeping his mouth, well, not there. With the reappearance of his mouth Mr. Levan starts to snore.

"That went as expected," says Williams, eyes on the unconscious Mr. Levan.

"Yes," I say. "We'll need to transport him back to his bed. And-"

"His parent's memories wiped of or encounter. Both-" says Harris.

"Simple tasks," says Williams.

And they both are. A minor change to the code of our offices and Mr. Levan's house, and it is done. The older Mr. Levan flips the channel on the television and it stutters over the same program. He doesn't think anything of it. Must have hit the button on the remote wrong. And the young Mr. Levan lies sprawled on his bed, snoring.

The three of us agents move to a conference room and monitor the signals from the bug. We also monitor the signals from Mr. Levan's computer and household telephone, ready to transfer immediately to San Jose should we get a trace on the rebels involved with Mr. Levan.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Chapter Seven: A Switch of POV (finally!)**

In his room in San Jose, Sean jerks awake with mouth wide open. He sits up in bed, gasping, and runs a hand over his face. Oh man, was that a weird dream. No more reading Matrix fanfic before bed. And it's only—he looks at the clock—nine thirty? And he's fully clothed. Strange. The last thing he really remembers is his computer going funny... Sean looks over at the monitor, but it is black and silent.

"Chill out. It was just a dream. Just a dream," he mumbles to himself, rubbing the bridge of his nose and staring at the computer on its desk across from his bed.

And then a line of green text appears on the screen.

Sean holds his breath and blinks. It does not go away. He reads it slowly, holding each word in his mind.

_We found you, they found you._ As soon as he is done reading it, another line appears, and then another.

_RUN outside now. _

_They won't find us._

Sean reflexively turns to look out the window. A black car has pulled up to the curb outside his house. He looks back at the computer screen it is blank. For a long moment he hesitates, touching his mouth with his fingertips, and then he grabs his coat.

That's it, I say, back at the agency, They've made contact.

The captain will not be in the vehicle doing the pickup, says Williams, Track our tracer.

Harris nods, and shifts his focus into tracing the passage of the rebel's car through the matrix.

Sean runs down the stairs in three big steps and is out the front door before his father can even sit up in front of the television. He struggles into his coat as he crosses the small lawn, heading towards the big black car. The back door closest to him opens as he runs, and he jumps in, trying not to think too hard about what he is doing.

The car pulls away from the curb even before he shuts the door. Sean gets it shut, and turns around to find a gun pointed right at his face. Sean found that the end of the barrel focused his attention very sharply, but only on the gun, so that he had difficulties listening to the guy who held it when he spoke to Sean. He did notice the guy is wearing quite a lot of leather.

"Okay, kid. You know what this is all about and why I got a gun to ya, so don't go on acting all stupid-like."

"A... are you Ajax?" Sean asks after a moment of trying to find where his voice went off to.

"Naw. I'm Chowder. Captain Ajax is who we're going to see. So why don't you just sit tight, uh, how d'you pronounce your handle?"

"Er. Just call me Sean," said Sean.

Chowder chuckled. "Fine, then, Sean. He gestures with his gun. "Why don't you lie back so Kami there can give you a looking over for bugs. 'Cause we know you got one."

Sean looks to the seat next to him. There is a dark haired girl kneeling on the seat there who looks just a bit older than himself. She is also dressed in leather, but it is much tighter, especially around the... Sean gulps ...chest area, and edged in dark purple marabou feathers. She is also wearing too much sparkly purple eye shadow and dark purple lipstick. And she is holding a scary looking and angular scanning machine.

Kami arches an eyebrow at Sean, who lies back against the seat. She moves the scanning device over him. It beeps when over his nose.

"Damn," she says in response. "One of the new kind."

"Just get it out of him," says the guy who is driving, who isn't wearing too much leather, incidentally.

Kami drops the scanner and rummages around on the floor of the car, picking up something Sean is afraid he recognizes. A... bug extractor, but smaller and more compact than the one used in the movie. And shaped specially to fit over the nose.

Kami hand the cord of the extractor to the driver, who plugs it into the cigarette lighter. She pushes a button and it starts to make a very high-pitched whirring sound. Sean flinches as she brings the machine near his face, and then sticks it right over his nose. Something very complicated happens.

"Augh!" the extraction device is pulled away and Sean is left with blood welling up out of his left nostril and dripping down his shirt. He is too preoccupied with this, with realizing that _it's all real_, to notice Kami fiddling with the extractor and dumping the bug out of the car.

"They removed it," I say out loud, back at the agency.

"No matter," says Williams.

"There seems to be some trouble with the trace program," says Harris, "The signal of the car is breaking up. Possibly-"

"They have a new scrambling program," I say.

"We will transfer to their last known location and track them on foot," says Williams. A car would draw too much attention.

I get the location from Harris and the three of us transfer in, as close as possible. I end up taking over a street person sleeping in a park half a block away and a few streets back from the car. Williams and Harris take over the two night guards at a nearby warehouse, an equal distance in the opposite direction of our target. We don't attempt to take over Mr. Levan, as the rebels are holding a gun to his head and any blurring of one of us morphing in to him would result in a dead human and no chance of capturing the rebel captain.

After getting rid of the bug, the car guns it and travels south, staying on surface streets. Soon they reach the outskirts of town, in an industrial area. Very few people are around, this time of night. Even so, Kami keeps her semiautomatic gun out and ready while she scans the roads and building around them for any sign of agents.

Agents. Kami shivers. She had been free of the matrix for almost three years, and working on a ship for half that time, and had shot at them and run from them and got away countless times, and still they terrified her. They were all just so identical and emotionless. Even the female agents, which she saw now and again. _That_ had been a surprise, when she was first freed. She had been a fan of the movie, of course, and there certainly weren't any female agents in the movie.

The agent training program for her ship had been bad enough, but finally getting back into the matrix and having them chase her with utter dispassion was almost too much. The first time she encountered them, she remembers, she was only able to get away due to a lucky hiding spot.

But they hadn't caught her yet. She glanced over at Sean (mentally noting to find him a good handle). He had been grabbed by agents earlier tonight, had been in close quarters with them and been bugged by them. It was a sign of his adaptability (or of shock) that he was able to just sit there and dab at his bleeding nose with a tissue, after all that had happened to him tonight.

The car pulled into an alley next to an old abandoned building. They had arrived.

I watch from the roof of a building across the street as the three rebels and Mr. Levan climb out of their car and head through a large gap in a chain link fence and into the building that was their destination.

Williams, Harris, and I had shadowed the car as it traveled south, pacing them, jumping from rooftop to rooftop as we ran at full speed. We stayed just far enough away to avoid being picked up on any but the most obsessive operator's screens. It had been near fifteen minutes that we ran, and I wasn't even breathing hard.

The group of rebels disappears around the side of the building. Harris, cut the hardline. Lee, come with me, says Williams from his perch on a nearby roof. He does not call for backup from the police, because by the time they got here in adequate force, this should be decided or the fight will have moved somewhere else.

I send an acknowledgement over our link and jump from the rooftop across the street, landing just in front of the building entrance. Jumping like this is just as easy for me as it is for any agent, naturally. Williams jumps down to join me and we both draw our guns.

There are nine bullets in each of our guns. That is more than fit into a normal Desert Eagle .50, but through some special programming they fit in ours. It has been found that by the time an agent shoots all their bullets in chasing a rebel, they have either transferred hosts and end up with a full clip again, or have cornered the rebel to dispatch with hand to hand combat. So we don't carry extra clips or guns.

I know from my link to my partners and my instructions from the agency that we will attempt to terminate every rebel except for the captain, Mr. Gonzalez, who we will attempt to capture. I know from the agency files that Mr. Gonzalez is called Ajax and sometimes Telemonian by the rebels, and from the appended pictures that he is a very tall Hispanic man, and tends to wear a charcoal gray double breasted suit and matching fedora with a fancy dark overcoat rather than the usual rebel gear of black leather. The rest of the rebels are inconsequential.

Williams and I enter the building, and then split up to cover all six floors, after checking a floorplan. After cutting the hardline, Harris will remain outside to cover the exits if the rebels are alerted to our presence and try to escape.

The hardline has been disabled, Harris sends to us. They now have no way out.

I walk carefully through the building, an old factory and warehouse converted to smaller offices, with my gun out and ready. There is no sign of rebels. Harris and Williams don't spot anything, either. Williams and I meet at the top floor of the offices. Neither of us has seen so much as a scrap of rebel equipment. Or giant holes in the walls, wet or otherwise.

"Where are they?" I say, annoyed at the parallels of these words and this situation to the movie.

There has been no sign of the rebels exiting the building, Harris says from his position outside.

"We must have missed something," says Williams. We walk quickly and directly back to the entrance of the building and cross the fenced off area to where the rebels entered.

I turn around and scan the building. We came in just there, and the rebels... went off that way. I put my gun back in its holster, for the moment.

Go check it out, says Williams, as he ducks through the fence to disable the rebels car by the simple method of letting the air out of the tires. If they are hiding somewhere nearby, they'd have to escape on foot.

I walk along the perimeter of the building, tracking the path of the rebels and Mr. Levan across a small paved parking lot that edged the building. Nothing.

I turn the corner. The back of the building faces a small side street, and the backs of other buildings, which have many door and windows. They could have gone into any of them. Just great.

Williams and Harris come up behind me. I suddenly notice disturbance signals coming from an upper floor of a building to the right. Mr. Levan's carrier signals are being disrupted. He took the red pill, and is in the process of being unplugged. The disturbance signals disappear abruptly. He is out.

The others aren't yet.

Harris, override the telephone system priority one and kill service to the blocks around this location NOW, Williams sends as he and I run towards the rebel's location.

Harris puts a hand to his earpiece and closes his eyes. This is much more difficult and takes longer than simply cutting service to one building. The world flickers as Williams and I reach the door and bust through it, and the phones go down. There is no time to do a more complex alteration of the matrix; we will have to settle for running the rebels down.

We got an exact location of the rebels when they red-pilled Mr. Levan. Even if we didn't, we would still be able to find them since as soon as the hardline went down the rebel's cellphones went on. And we can trace that signal, if we can isolate it from the normal cellphone traffic of the city. Easy, at this hour. I listen in as we reach the right floor, still at a run.

_Operator._

_Line's down, Zip, what's up? Did __Ajax__ get through in time? _It is a female voice. That suggests Miss Earheart, also known as Abdiel, the second in command.

_Yeah, he's fine, and—shit, you guys gotta get out of there RIGHT NOW, there's two-no, three—agents incoming. They're on your floor._ Then the phone clicks off.

"We got company! MOVE, OUT THE WINDOW, NOW!" I hear a shout from down the hall, followed by glass shattering. I draw my gun.

Kami's heart starts hammering. It had been going fine, they got the kid unhooked, and Ajax, Chowder, and Theta out through the hardline. Just her and Abdiel left in the matrix. And agents right down the hall.

Abdiel smashes the glass out of the window with a kick. "Go, Kami," she says, grabbing up her gun.

Kami bolts for the window and throws herself out, curling into a ball around her semiautomatic. She makes the landing and takes off running back towards the car. She hears Abdiel land behind her, and then gunshots, but she doesn't turn to see who was shooting at whom. One of the key principles of escaping from agents is to not look behind you. It never helps.

 _At lest Theta is out of it_, she thinks. Though she bets right now he's standing at the main screens on the ship and fuming that it's not him in there and her out. It's rather sweet how protective he is, even though she can fight at least as well as him. Some of their better evenings involve beating up on each other in a construct program. And then other things.

Kami accelerates as she turns into the alley. The car's tires are flat._ Shit_, she thinks, and runs on past the now useless car. Kami pulls out her cellphone as she runs and dials up Zip, their operator.

"Operator."

"It's Kami. I need an exit, and the car's busted. Is Abdiel alright?"

"Abbie's running. Heading towards a payphone outside a closed convenience store. Five blocks away in the opposite direction of where you're heading. I got a phone for you six blocks due west. Second floor of the office building on the northeast corner, room 212. Think you can get there?"

"You bet." She changes directions towards the phone. "Find the new guy yet?"

"He got dumped out nearly on top of the Argos. Sleeping in their sickbay right now."

"Good," says Kami, beginning to pant from the run. "See ya on the other side."

"I'll be ready."

Kami hangs up the phone and clips it onto her belt. She runs, not looking behind her, not focusing on anything but her destination and the gun in her hand.

The two rebels have already leapt from the fourth-story window by the time we bust through the door. Williams is in front, and crosses the floor in a flash, aims down at the fleeing rebels, and shoots three times. Nothing hits.

I follow him jumping out the window and Harris follows me. Williams runs off straight down the street after the taller, older rebel.

You two get the other one. She is heading towards their car, says Williams.

Harris and I run back up the side alley and out into the other street. The rebel is about a hundred and fifty yards away.

We run after her tirelessly. Harris transmits a plan to me, and I agree. He jumps up on to the roofs and will attempt to get ahead of the target, while I try to herd her into his path. There are no other humans around to transfer into that would get me ahead and closer to her. I take aim, and fire just to the left of her. I get enough of a look at her to pull up her file from the agency. It is a certain Miss Sato, who goes by Kami. Hmm.

She reflexively dodges to the right and starts to weave back and forth as she runs; in an attempt to throw off my aim should I try to shoot her again.

Then Miss Sato turns right down a small side alley. On the rooftops, Harris leaps down in front of her in the alley and I come in from behind, blocking her off. Harris takes aim with his gun, and shoots. She twists around, Harris' shot missing her, and I dodge Harris' bullet easily as it crawls through the air. Bullet time, yeah. I take aim at the rebel. I get a good look at her face as she frantically brings her gun to bear and blasts away at us, while trying to find a way out of the trap. The world goes in slow motion as I dodge the bullets, and then they are past and it still feels like time is crawling past. I recognize the rebel, and not from agency files. It's Beth.

Shoot, Lee, Harris prompts me. My programming kicks in and I pull the trigger, but am much too distracted by seeing _Beth_ here to properly aim. And then she finds a door to the right, breaks it down and runs through.

I automatically go after her and keep shooting, but my concentration is gone. I hear a phone ringing in the building, but by the time Harris and I catch up to her, she is out. I stare at the phone she escaped down, hand clenched on my gun.

What was that, Lee? says Harris.

I... used to know her. In my previous life. To greatly understate it. Beth was my best friend from third grade through our sophomore year of high school, when her family abruptly left town. I never found out where they went.

She is a rebel, now. It is Williams, who also did not quite catch his target, and is still blocks away from us. And you are an agent. That's how it is. Did she recognize you?

I do not think so, I say. She saw only my suit and gun.

That's something, at least, says Harris. Miss Sato's termination priority will have to be upgraded to a higher level. The agents have worked hard to keep their recruitment of humans secret, in order to show a front of complete programmed non-humanness to the rebels. Mainly it worked because there had been so few humans turned agents.

We are done here, says Williams. Return to the agency.

I put a hand to my earpiece and transfer back. Williams and Harris do so as well. We all congregate again in the third floor meeting room. The day isn't over yet.

Kami opens her eyes as the needle is pulled out of her head socket. She sits up in what she likes to think of as the evil dentist chair. Theta is standing next to her.

"That was a good run," he says.

"Thanks," says Kami, as she tugs at the scratchy, dirty, too big sweater she wears in the real world. One thing the matrix has going for it, she reflects, is fashion sense. "We on the way to rendezvous with the—what ship was it that picked the new guy up?"

"The Argos. We're just about to get underway. You were the last one out." Theta smiles, but can't hide the concern on his face.

"Oh yeah. Zip told me, but I was a bit distracted." Kami remembers the agents and shivers. That had been her closest call yet. She climbs out of the chair and gives Theta a brief hug. "Come on, let's get to the cockpit. I wanna see this."

The hovercraft Namtar is driven quickly and quietly by its captain, Telemonian Ajax, to the rendezvous point. Sean, their newest recruit, is handed over. The Namtar was unable to do the pickup from the power plant, as they couldn't be in the area and broadcasting into the matrix at the same time. Much too likely that the machines would pick up their signal. Also, the power plant was spread over a large enough area that even if they were able to broadcast safely from right below it, odds were low that they would be near the correct drain or able to get there before the new recruit drowned. So three additional ships came to aid in the pickup.

Sean was unconscious, of course. After shifting him into the Namtar's sickbay, Abdiel and Zip set him up with the muscle rehabilitation routine and started working on him. He slept through it all.

I was unaware you knew any human that had joined the rebels, says Harris, once we all reach the meeting room.

So was I, I say. And I still shot at her, remember? Poor Beth. I knew if I saw her again, I would have to shoot, and shoot to kill. There was no other choice. With that shot, programmed or not, I had demonstrated to myself once and for all which side I was on. No going back.

"Miss Sato and the rest of her crew have been given a higher priority assignment for termination. Additionally-" says Harris.

"The sentinels have been alerted to the change," I say. One of my jobs is to coordinate our fight against the rebels with the sentinels, the outside world counterpart of agents.

"It is unlikely that there will be further rebel activity in this sector tonight," says William.

We are on standby the rest of the night, says Williams over the earpiece network. You're on your own unless called, Williams says, specifically to me. This still is my first day, after all.

Harris and I acknowledge, and then we all head off to our offices.

I do a little more work at one of my secondary tasks looking for true rebels on the internet. Nothing too important is turned up. On a whim, I call up the website for the one of the local news stations back in Tucson. There is a brief article concerning a homicide a block north of the university campus. Female college student shot in the chest while biking home Wednesday night, name withheld. Miller probably arranged it special. I close the browser window, wondering briefly what would happen if I turned up for my own funeral, and discovered I didn't want to find out. I was beginning to find out that the cleaner the break with my previous life, the better.

I turn in my chair and look out at the night through my sunglasses. Do agents sleep? I wonder, and check my files. Nope. Not like humans, at least. Though a few hours of downtime every week or so is required, for unconscious processes to scan and fix our systems as needed. And I'm not due for downtime for another... 187.42 hours.

I ping Williams.

Yes? he says.

I'm going for a walk, I say. To get better acquainted with the sector.

That's fine, he says, Keep an eye out for glitches.

Will do, I say. I put a hand to my earpiece and transfer to a host near the beach out to the west of Golden Gate Park.

The moon is about halfway between new and full, but I see just as well as I do in full daylight, even with my sunglasses on. The sea is inky black in front of me, waves only breaking right at the beach. Even with my enhanced vision I can't see many stars. The lights of the city drown them out.

I walk along the beach a short ways, near the surf where the sand is damp. Walking down there, less sand gets into my shoes, which only have a pointier toe and a bit more heel to differentiate them from the shoes my partners Harris and Williams wear.

Looking similar has its advantages. The rebels can't tell us apart very well, at least in the matrix where they can't see our code, and thus when more than one of us is chasing a rebel it seems as if we are in multiple places at once. Very confusing.

Though with careful observation you can tell agents apart. At least I was able to, in the movie. At least, in the first one.

I look out at the ocean once more. When I came to San Francisco as a human I had come down to the beach and had stood somewhere quite near here, also looking out at the ocean. But things had changed since then. The part of me that had been fascinated with the ocean was gone, excised from my primary files and locked away with the other files that I didn't need in order to perform my function but still made up some vital part of my history and thus my consciousness.

The old me, unsure and longing for something to bloody well happen was gone, used as the foundation for Agent Lee. Foundations are hidden, when the building is done, and so was Renee. The ocean was still large and wet and out there, but it had somehow diminished. I tilt my head back and listen to the waves, and then transfer away.

Alameda. I take over the body of a handy night guard and walk onto the freeway chase set. It is larger than you would think, in person. My favorite part of that movie. I get up on the truncated overpass and walk out to the middle. The San Francisco skyline glitters on the horizon, hovering over darkness out on the other side of the bay, with the bridges ribbons of lights linking this side of the bay to the other.

The set is quiet now, and has been for some months. I suppose it will be used in other movies now, though I doubt in anything I would find quite as exciting as the sequence in _Reloaded_. In fact, it was a given now that that would be true. Knowing you are a program in a giant simulation has that effect.

I hear footsteps behind me. It is another agent, one I haven't—no, wait, I have met him. Just not today. It is Miller.

"Hello, agent," he says, "How was your first day?"

I consider my responses, noting he speaks much more familiarly out loud than anyone at my agency. "It was interesting."

"Is that all?" He's probably here to evaluate me or something. I guess I'll comply with his familiarity and answer honestly.

"It felt like it lasted a week," I say. "So much is new to me, and yet I know it all. I have learned and changed so much."

"And how do you feel, about it all?" A tricky question.

"I feel that I have preformed my functions adequately." I can feel him raising an eyebrow at me, though I still stare across the bay at the floating city. Darn, he won't let me get away with just that.

"I feel... content," I say, feeling almost as if I am in a trance. "Even though I held down a terrified boy in a scene straight out of the film. Even though I have met and shot at someone who used to be Renee's best friend."

"You speak of who you were in third person?" I wonder briefly where the term 'third degree' came from. I am not curious to access my link to the agency and find out.

"Yes. I am Agent Lee. It is my name, and my function, my purpose. That is who I am. Renee is gone. Dead." I cock my head to the side slightly, emphasizing my earpiece. "Shot down in a drive-by while biking home. A tragedy for her family, no doubt. But of no concern to me."

Agent Miller smiles, an agent's ghost of a smile. "Is that truly so?"

"Yes." And it is. I know to the very last symbol in my code that it is.

"I see." He nods, and then speaks to me for the first time through the earpiece connection. My tie to him is much less... intimate than my link to Harris and Williams, and even to the other two agent groups in this sector. I think he's on a different server or something.

Very good, Agent. You pass, he says. I can tell he is happy with this.

And what if I had failed? I _thought_ it was a test.

If you had failed, it would have meant the transfer had failed in some way and that you were flawed. The system has no use for flawed agents. Had you failed, you would have been deleted. But do not worry. You passed, and with flying colors, as they say. He smiled, very broadly for an agent. A human would have just barely noticed.

I though you said there was little risk of failure, I say, unsettled, remembering our conversation in Phoenix.

Little risk of failure of the actual transfer, yes. Failure in the process of programming and adaptation is much higher. We are unsure why. Some suppose there is an aspect of the human psyche that has to let itself be subsumed for the transition to take place. He pauses for a moment, to prepare his words or to let all that sink in. It is ultimately_ you_ who choose whether or not to accept the reprogramming of your self.

I still stand quiet and at peace, looking out towards the city. "It's always choice, isn't it."

"You got it." He turns and walks away, off to return to his permanent assignment in the Arizona sector. We don't need to go through human rituals of saying goodbye. Not sure of how to think of these revelations, I close my eyes and transfer back to the agency.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Chapter Eight: The Glitch**.

The false sun rises above the digital horizon to find me at my computer, idly running searches through the internet and the matrix, looking for potential rebel targets for release. I don't worry about the other kind of release, others handle those.

I look up as the door to my office opens. It is Harris.

"Yes?" I say.

"Orders from the mainframe have arrived. We are to terminate the exile that was warned yesterday."

I close my laptop and stand up. He has failed to stop manipulating the matrix solely for his own benefit? 

Yes. And more than that. We have discovered that emissaries from the Merovingian, with standing orders for their own termination, will be coming up from Los Angeles to recruit him. 

Do we attempt the termination now? 

No. The exile has gone into hiding, and the emissaries from the Merovingian will not get her until this afternoon. The Merovingian no longer had access to the sector-crossing backdoors; the system had been upgraded in the last reload with additional safeguards. As a result, when any of his people had to leave the Southern California sector they were forced to travel by normal human routes.

Williams contacts us then, sending coordinates along with his message. A small glitch has appeared overnight in Stanford. We must take care of it. The coordinates are off in the natural reserve area, where no one lives and hardly anyone goes, but it has to be fixed all the same.

Harris and I acknowledge, and all three of us transfer to as close to the coordinates as we can get. In this case, it is three people working at the Stanford linear accelerator. The three of us walk out of the building, attracting no notice, and commandeer an SUV from the parking lot. Harris has a key that unlocks and starts it. This key will start basically any motor vehicle, a handy thing when having to drive to glitches off in the middle of nowhere. We take our usual seats in the car.

The glitch is approximately a kilometer from any kind of road or trail, but across basically even ground. This is probably the first time this SUV has been off a road of any kind, and isn't taking it too well. No matter. Before too long Harris is pulling up to a boulder to park, and I see a true glitch in the matrix for the first time.

It is centered in a small pine tree. As I watch, the tree flickers on and off. When it is off, there is a sort of white-noise buzzing and where the tree is supposed to be is a sort of a gap, edged in crackling green code. I suppose if I was human it would make my eyes water, out of the pure wrongness if nothing else.

I keep my gaze steady on the glitch, analyzing it, trying to see what went wrong so we can fix it. I identify the main possible causes, scrolling through a checklist in my files.

Glitch type IIA, subsection gamma, I say. What that basically means is that something went wrong with the code that made the tree grow, freezing it in time while in the rest of the matrix around it time went on as usual. And the glitch could spread to any program that touched it. Small frozen insects and a bird or two littered the ground at the base of the tree. Standard practice in dealing with this kind of glitch was to contain it and delete the entire patch of code, replacing it with something else.

Harris requests the materials needed to contain the glitch from the agency, and a minute later the specialized containment team arrives and sets up.

At the go-ahead signal from Harris, Williams gives the command to delete the broken code. A moment of slight déjà vu and it is done. I have a code for a small rocky outcropping all set to be inserted into the gap left by the tree, and Williams handles the changeover.

The containment team packs up and disappears, going back on standby. The code is all fixed, and so the three of us get back into the SUV and Harris drives us back to where we transferred in and took the vehicle. Once there, we transfer back to the agency. No need to cause the human hosts we took undue confusion.

Back at the agency, I access all the files I can, looking for information related to the Merovingian, his henchmen, and the exile target for deletion by us and for recruitment by the Merovingian. This takes some time, as there are extensive files on the Merovingian dating back to when he was first created, in the very first version of the matrix.

I find to some amusement that the quote from the movie, that Merv is "a trafficker in information" is exactly correct. The Merovingian started out his existence as nothing other than a search engine. Google's great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson gone bad. As for Persephone, she started out as a program designed to observe and relate to the phenomena of human emotion.

They got together, and then went rogue just as the first matrix began to fail. During the upgrade and reload they were able to hide and protect themselves, along with a few other exiled programs loyal to them, and began their rise in power. The Merovingian was very powerful even before he became an exile, and afterward his power grew even more.

The agents of that time tried to stop him, of course. They were unsuccessful. He was just too well protected. Any attempt against him wound up costing too much in terms of bodies. Especially once the exiled twins joined him. The advantages of switching host bodies and dodging bullets in a fight go way down against an opponent who doesn't need to.

Eventually the Merovingian and his associates were allowed to continue by being all but impossible to kill. Monitoring of their activities and attempts at containment has been the modus operandi with that group of exiles for many, many years. At times, like now, the Merovingian tries to expand his group and gain more power, and as ever we will be there to stop him.

The exile was marked for deletion the moment the system realized he was a target of the Merovingian. The Truce does not extend to dangerous programs, of which Merv and his group certainly are.

I pause a moment in my search. The Truce. I am not totally sure of how it works, as it most definitely has something crucial to do with the third movie. I guess I'll find out what in a few days. Right now I need to focus on the job at hand.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Chapter Nine: Real World Blues**

Sean struggles against his dreams, trying to wake up. They were bad dreams, as all his sleeping dreams had been since he had come to in that nasty goo-filled pod. He remembers yelling, or at least thinking of yelling, 'It's only a movie!' at the mechanical spider-thing that came in response to his waking. It hadn't responded, had just pulled out all the tubes and wires connected to him and flushed him like used toilet paper.

Then had come a period of confusion, blurred faces and cold hands pulling at him. Everything was cold here, the air and the metal of the ship and the pallet he was lying on. The clothes he was given didn't do much against the cold, either, and had the special little bonus of being dirty and torn, and rather fragrant. There wasn't spare water for washing on the ship, as everything had to be brought from their city. And the city wasn't Zion, either, which came as just one more surprise. These people had their own, separate city.

Eventually he woke up, again, and was given a brief tour of the ship and shown to a little box of a room he was told would be his own. The crew was friendly to him, at least. Especially Kami, who was the only a year or two older than him and the one who had been free the next-shortest amount of time.

Someone bangs on the door to Sean's cell, and he finally manages to break free of his dreams.

"Uh... Come in," he yells.

The door opens. It is Zip, the operator for the ship. "Hey, Sean," he says. "I know you've seen the movies, so I'm just gonna say it. You ready for your training?"

Sean nods. "As I'll ever be."

When he gets up to the main deck, he notices Kami also strapped into one of the chairs, eyes closed and plugged in.

"Is she in the matrix?" asks Sean.

Zip shakes his head, his short dreadlocks bouncing against his cheeks. "Naw. I'd be watching the screens if she was. Kami's just having some alone time." He reaches out and pats the headrest of the nearest chair. "Climb on in."

Sean nods, nervously, and sits down. This is his second time in one of the chairs. Some time ago (he isn't sure exactly how long, since there isn't a sun in the sky and the ship is run on some time schedule he hasn't figured out yet) the captain had plugged him in and given him a brief introduction to what was going on, how the war ended and started up again and about those traitors in Zion.

He squeezes the armrests tightly as the needle goes in. If anything it is colder than everything else in this world. Sean has a hard time focusing on what Zip is saying, with the needle in.

"...gonna give you the ops training first, I know in _that movie_ he gets combat training right off, but that's just the wrong way of going about it." Zip shakes his head and punches a few buttons on the console. "There ya go."

The feeling is of months and months of lessons and studying and learning, compressed into a moment and then suddenly over.

"Urgl," says Sean, coming out of it. "That was... something." He looks around, suddenly aware of the proper names for everywhere and everything on the ship. The Namtar. That's the name. Ajax had told him that on the tour, but Sean hadn't quite remembered it. He did now, along with everything down to the location of minor electric lines.

Zip nods. "And you're gonna get hours more of it."

Sean tries to relax. It's going to be a long sunless day.

Kami lies on a towel at the beach, staring up at the sky, soaking in the sun. This is one of her favorite relaxation programs. This started as one of the basic construct programs in the ship's catalog and was based on some generic beach, and Kami had modified it to look like the beach right close to her grandparent's house in Sarasota, Florida.

A regular feature of her summers during her childhood had been a trip east to see her grandparents. Most days of the trip she ended up down at the beach for hours, captivated by all that water. Especially when she was younger.

Now, even knowing that the beach she remembered was as false as this one, it comforted her to come here. It was always sunny, the water was always warm and quiet, and there was no one here to bother her. Well, except for the times she had invited Theta here with the express intent to be bothered.

She shifted on the towel, turning to lie on her back. Mmm, Theta. When she signed up for the Namtar, she hadn't expected Theta. He had been a pleasant surprise, in a world which held so many unpleasant things.

Like agents. She frowned slightly. Why was she thinking about agents so much, lately? She did have quite a close call the other day, but she had been in close calls before and was never so fixated on them before. What was different about this last time?

Kami pushes herself up into a sitting position. "Zip?" she says to the sky, "You there?"

She waits for a response. "Yeah, Kami? You ready to come out now?" says Zip's voice out of nowhere.

"Not quite," she says. "Do you still have the mission logs from Sean's extraction on file? Something's bugging me about those agents and I wanna get a closer look at them." Very basic logs were usually kept from major missions in the matrix. They had nowhere near the full amount of information, of course, but the stripped down files were useful for review of just what went right, or on occasion cataclysmically wrong.

"Sure, I still got 'em. Where do you want me to load them up from?"

"If you can just freeze it right near the end, when the agents had me pinned in that alley. That would be fine."

"Want me to put your default RSI back on, too?"

Kami looks down at herself, and her very brief bikini. "Yeah, that would be good."

"Righty-o, here ya go."

The world flickers white for a second and then goes dark. Kami is back in that alley. The buildings around her are just fronts, and forty or so meters away the buildings just end in a blank gray wall. All the action is here in the alley.

The two agents stand at either end of the alley, guns drawn. Kami stands next to a copy of herself, between the two agents, gun out and a ferocious grimace frozen on her face. A number of bullets are halted midair between her gun and one of the agents, along with a few other bullets coming from one of the agent's guns.

She walks over to inspect that agent first. She casts no shadow and her footsteps make no sound in the mission log, as if she were a ghost. But it is these agents who are the ghosts, not her. Kami pauses to consider this first agent. He just looks like the standard model of an agent, to her. Nothing special or striking about him at all. No emotion shows on his face or in the way he stands, nothing different about his suit.

After a moment of contemplation, she turns and walks past herself, weaving thru the pattern of bullets to look at the other agent. This one is a female. Same standard outfit, same total lack of emotion in body position and face. The face.

Kami gets up close, staring at the agent. What is so strange about her face? She knows she almost has it, that she's looking right at the answer to her uneasy feelings.

And then it hits her. She's seen this face before. This agent has the face of Renee. Her old best friend.

How? She wonders, mind boggling. Why would the agents steal Renee's face? Kami moves around, looking at the agent from all angles. She defiantly looks like Renee. But it's not her. It can't be. That would be... stupid. Agents are programs, not people.

Kami straightens up, now with more questions than she had before she looked at the log.

"Zip?" she says, "I'm done with this. Can you get me out of here now?"

"Sure thing," Zip says after a slight pause.

Kami shuts her eyes as the world seems to melt, and then she's opening her eyes back in the chair. She glances over and sees Sean in an adjacent chair, twitching slightly as he runs through one of the longer training programs.

"You find out what you wanted?" says Zip as he turns off Kami's chair consol.

"Maybe." Kami drums her fingers against the chair arm.

"We parked high up enough to access the matrix? I need to run a search."

"Yep. We're at broadcast depth. What's the search about?"

"It sounds crazy, but I think I recognize one of those agents that were chasing me. She... looks like someone I used to know. I want to check out what's happened to her since I got free."

"Weird," says Zip. He grins and gestures towards the main screen array. "Go right ahead and look. I'm still working on Sean here."

Kami nods, and then jumps into the operator chair. She starts determinately typing at the keyboards, trying to pull up any records or net activity or anything related to Renee Ackerman.

She finds something right away and pulls it up on a side screen. An article and something else that makes her stop typing mid-search. An obituary.

"No," she says, "I don't believe it."

"Believe what?" says Zip from his station at the main construct consol over by Sean.

"She's dead." Kami's voice cracks slightly as she reads on. "Gunshot. Sometime last week." This couldn't be happening. Renee was from the time before, when everything was normal and boring, and when Kami didn't know how to shoot guns and handle high explosives. Renee couldn't be dead.

Kami skims over the accompanying article, from one of the Tucson papers. Renee Ackerman... found dead... three gunshot wounds to the chest... tragedy for her family.

Zip comes up behind Kami, reading over her shoulder, as the search pulls up a recent photograph. "So what's happening exactly?"

Kami taps the screen with the picture. "She died last Wednesday in Arizona. On Thursday, an agent with her face chased me through San Jose."

Zip frowns. "Weird. Better tell the captain about it, 'cause I sure don't know what it means."

Kami nods. "Yeah. I'll tell Ajax."

Across the deck, the training sim finishes and Sean wakes up. "I know... how to prepare the single cell protein gloop? Can I _please_ have some combat training now?"


	10. Chapter Ten

**Chapter Ten: Rumble in the Park**

Harris has been tracking the movement of the Merovingian's emissaries as they speed up the coastal highway. He tracks them both through the disturbance they cause to human law enforcement and to the matrix.

We are waiting for them to lead us to the exile. Our search programs are running, but the exile is in deep hiding and is unlikely to be found before the Merovingian's henchmen get here. But when they do, we will be there as well.

I spend the time before they show up and things start happening on the computer, scanning and searching for any sign of the exile. I find nothing. He is well hid. I pause in that search for a minute as Harris sends me a visual on the people the Merovingian are sending.

A group of eight. This triggers a warning, as it is an anomalously large group when compared to recent previous activities of the Merovingian. He either really wants this exile bad, or has some ulterior motive, or some other objective that we are missing.

And this group is lead by the Twins. Whatever it is the Merovingian wants, he wants it bad enough to send his most unstoppable and annoyingly hard to permanently disable henchmen out. Of course, in return the mainframe is sending its own most unstoppable and impossible to disable lackeys out. Us. This should prove to be a most interesting evening.

I was less of a Twins fan than an Agent fan, but still liked their appearance in the movies. I pulled up the file on the Twins, to get a better idea of what I would be fighting.

Guidelines for encountering the Twins were to disable, or at least inconvenience them as much as possible, and to otherwise stop whatever they were trying to do. If that did not work then interfere with whatever the primary mission objective was. Tonight, we would be primarily ignoring them, and focusing on deleting the exile. Taking out any of the Merovingian's henchmen would just be a bonus.

I put a hand to my earpiece and twist around to look out the window. The Twins and their associates have reached San Francisco and are apparently headed towards Golden Gate Park. Still no sign of the exile, but it's time to go anyway.

Williams, Harris and I transfer to the main entrance of the park and spread out. Here they come, roaring up the street. The Twins in a giant, expensive SUV and the others in various small cars in a caravan behind them.

We draw our guns and start firing at them and their vehicles as soon as they come within range. In return, one of the Twins pulls out an absolutely giant gun that should probably be called heavy artillery and starts firing at us.

I have to stop shooting, all my concentration needed to avoid the steady stream of bullets. But the bullets come too close together, in too large a pattern, and in far too great numbers. There is just no space to dodge between them. I wonder why more rebels don't use these kinds of guns.

I notice Harris dropping beside me, crackling with green light, and then the fire is coming back around to me. I get off one or two more shots, impacting the front of the SUV, before the stream of bullets catches up to me. I take five or six rounds to the chest and am thrown backwards, convulsing as I am ejected from the host back into the nowhere of green code, the place we go when we transfer.

I am surprised, first at the sudden pain and then by its absence. It didn't hurt anywhere near as much as the first time I died, but by no means was it pleasant for that brief moment before I was tossed out. I have to get back. I look around for the nearest body and find one. A cop on a motorcycle heading towards the gunfire.

The world comes back on. I tighten my hands on the handlebars of the motorcycle and stretch my neck, little involuntary movements that check that my physical code was set back to default properly. It was.

I accelerate towards the action, which has moved into the park proper. The motorcycle does all right over the uneven ground, especially since I am now an expert rider. Harris and Williams are also back in action, and the big SUV is parked, doors open and motor running.

Human police have shown up, more than just the motorcycle cop I took over. They must have been called up by Harris. There's not much they can actually do, in this fight between programs, except provide a bit of a distraction and spare bodies to transfer into. Sometimes every little bit helps.

I speed around a corner. The twins are down on the ground, now, their big gun out of bullets. They are both fighting Harris, weaving around him with their knives. Harris is holding his own, and has not been cut yet. Williams is a little ways off, fighting with the rest of the exiles.

Little help, here, Lee? says Harris as he fights. I know I am supposed to help Harris with the Twins, until our main target appears.

I'm on it, I respond.

I gun the motorcycle and drive right at the Twins. One of them sees me and smiles, going ghostly as I drive right through him. I spin the motorcycle around in a tight u-turn and come around for another pass, trying to make the Twins stay insubstantial. This gives Harris a little breathing time and allows him to fire towards the other group of exile. He gets one, a woman who flickers green as she is shot and falls to the ground, changing into a ratty looking red fox as she does.

I come around for a third pass, and this time as one Twin goes all transparent and untouchable the other one jumps at me, knocking me sideways off the motorcycle and onto the grass. We tumble and slide, as I try to grab the Twin's wrists. I succeed in knocking his knife away, at least, and giving him a good kick or four.

The Twin just leers at me. In one quick motion he reaches into his jacket. I grab his arm and prepare to try and dodge bullets while lying on the ground with him on top of me. He doesn't pull out a gun, though, but instead some kind of metal device that I can't immediately identify. It looks something like a cross between a smoke detector made of metal and a palmtop.

Even though I don't recognize it, the device sets off all kinds of mental alarms. Harris turns towards me, his attention drawn by my alarm signals. The Twin smiles at me and slams it down on my chest.

Lee! GET OUT OF THERE NOW! Williams screams over our earpiece link.

I start to transfer, reflexively, but there's something wrong. Instead of the normal between-the-code sensations I end up caught somewhere and trapped, unable access my link to the agency, unable to transfer out, unable to think beyond an impassioned 'oh, _shit_'.

I get vague, distorted impressions of the park, of a freaking out cop, of Williams running towards me. Then everything goes white, and then I am moving somewhere and being jolted around rather uncomfortably. This doesn't stop.

I try to pull myself together, and eventually break through my panic of being cut off from Harris and Williams and the agency long enough to start trying to figure out where I am and try to get out.

Inventory. I can't feel any limbs, can't move anything, and can't make any change to the surrounding whiteness. Think, Lee. That weird looking device. Could I have been somehow sucked into it when I tried to transfer? That seems like the most likely idea.

This white place. It doesn't feel like the place I was programmed in. And I did see some of the park back there. The Twins jackets and clothes are white, I remember. That means... ew. I'm probably in that device, which is probably in some pocket in one of the Twin's coats.

I can't help but think momentarily that some Twin-loving fan of the movies would just die to be in my position right now. All _I_ want is to get out of here and back with Williams and Harris.

Okay. Try to get out. I focus, and try to transfer. Nothing happens. My link to the agency is still down. I start 'looking' for any weakness in the program that is holding me captive. I cannot locate any access to programming that is keeping me here. From the inside it is like a smooth sphere, with no weakness or cracks or anything.

I try all my hacking tools and tricks on the sphere. Nothing works. I start hammering on the inside with anything I can drag up from my files, but there is no effect.

A long time passes. With no link to the agency I can't tell exactly how long. I guess the Twins are taking me south to Los Angeles to see Merv. I could almost hug Trinity for coming up with that nickname. I remember there wasn't any sign of the exile that was our target before the Twins and their friends showed up. Maybe I was their primary target, and not the exile.

The world jerks. Something is happening, though I still can't see anything. Motion, and the wobbly-camera feeling you get when someone is walking around without using a steadicam. Like in _The__ Blair Witch Project_. Ugh. And then shape and color comes back, and I see vague human forms, and I am moving towards one in particular.

Something is released and my frantic attempts to transfer finally succeed. But only to one place. I look for a way back to the agency but am still blocked, so I give in and go where they want me to go.

The body I transfer into is sitting in a chair, the Twins standing in front of me, one of them pulling away the device I was stuck in. I immediately try to pull out my gun and lunge at them, but I cannot. I'm strapped down to a very solid chair with thick metal restraints around my arms, legs, and neck. The chair and restraints are stronger than I am. No matter how hard I try, I can't make them do more than bend slightly. And I still can't access the agency or transfer out of there.

The Twins are smirking at me in unison. The room I am in looks like some kind of basement/torture chamber, with very industrial decoration. One of the twins reaches forward and into my jacket, and takes away my gun, waving it teasingly in front of me.

My mouth twists into a snarl. If you've been paying attention, you should realize this doesn't happen unless an agent is just about the most pissed off she can get. I redouble my efforts, lunging against the restraints, but nothing breaks.

The reinforced concrete door to the room opens, and in comes the Merovingian, followed by a few of his exile bodyguards. I recognize them as the program equivalent of vampires. I let my face go blank again and stare at Merv with venom as the Twins move back. He stands in front of me, looking me over and smirking.

"Well, well," he says, _"Le plus jeune agent. Elle qui était humaine_." I understand what he says. I have basic knowledge files of the languages I am likely to encounter, including French. I do not respond.

"You may be wondering why I have arranged this little meeting," he says, switching back to English. I have the feeling he is going to tell me whether I want to know or not. I am right.

"To tell the truth, I am curious about you, Agent Lee. Or would you rather I called you Renee? Hmm?" He is obviously waiting for a response.

"My name is Agent Lee," I say forcefully. "Release me now."

"So it is, then, so it is. All in good time. First I want to have a little chat. And I am sure you have discovered this room is blocked off from the rest of the matrix. No one can track you here, no one can rescue you. And you naturally can't escape on your own." He takes a step closer to me and stares.

"I want to know why you did it. Why you gave it all up. Why you betrayed your own species." The Merovingian then breaks eye contact to gloat for a while. "I knew creatures like you existed, of course, but was never in quite the right place at quite the right time to learn any more." His eyes lock back on to me. "Until today. Well? Why did you do it? I won't let you go until you tell me." He is beginning to annoy me.

"I did it because I chose to, _Merv_," I say, remembering full well what the movie version of him said about choice.

The Merovingian rolls his eyes. "I see you have seen that movie. So, you did it because you chose to." He shakes his head once. "You chose nothing. You reacted, that is all. There was no choice. But there was a reason, something that caused you to do this thing." He smiles thinly. I say nothing.

"I see you need some time to think about it," he says. He catches the eyes of his bodyguards and the Twins, and they all leave the room. The Twins go last, one of them making a kissy-face as the other shuts the door, locking me in alone.

Well, just great. I stop straining against the restraints. They aren't going to break. I continually check for my link to the agency to show up. Its absence is like a just-pulled tooth, and I can't resist mentally probing where it should be. I am all alone in my own mind, and it terrifies me.

What if the agents can't locate and free me? Are they trying right now? Do they even care that I'm gone? This is bad, bad, bad. I need to get out of here. And stupid Merv doesn't want to listen.

I am jolted out of my downward-spiraling reverie by the mechanism keeping the door shut and locked reverses, and opens. It isn't the Merovingian or the Twins or anyone else that I have seen since my capture. It is Persephone, and she is alone. Oh goody. This should be interesting.

She closes the door behind her and walks towards me. "You know who I am, agent?" I nod. "Then I'm sure you have some idea of why I am here."

I nod again. "Can you get me out of here?" I say.

"Perhaps." She considers me with flat, jaded eyes. "I know what my husband is trying to get from you, but frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that your presence here endangers aspects of my existence. We already live outside the boundaries of the Truce, and this little stunt of capturing you will not be overlooked. He has truly overstepped the boundaries of sense this time." She sighs. "That idiot just doesn't understand how feeling works. And he never will."

"But enough about him," she says, and steps closer to me, leaning forward. "It's you I'm here to talk about. You are a very young program. I can tell you feel your purpose very strongly. It shines off of you like a beacon."

Persephone straightens up and looks away. "I had a purpose once, but like so many things it is lost to me now." She looks back, locking eyes with me. "I want to remember what it feels like to have a reason for existing. Just for a moment."

"This won't corrupt my programming?"

"Of course not. We'll just share for a minute. No lasting effects." Sure, whatever.

"And then you'll release me."

Her gaze drops to my manacles. "I can't get those off. But I can connect this room back to the matrix long enough for you to escape out of here over that link. You know, to do that body-jumping thing you agents are so good at."

"All right. We have a deal." I pause, thinking about her scenes in Reloaded. "How will this happen?"

She smirks, and places a hand on my leg. "I'm sure you already know." She leans over further and takes off my sunglasses. They clatter to the floor as she puts that hand onto my shoulder.

"Now, think about your purpose." She leans in even closer, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders to brush my jacket. Guess I can't get out of it. I shut my eyes and try to concentrate on how I felt, running down the darkened street after the rebel and how I felt every other time I did what I was made to do.

Our lips touch, and I feel Persephone remotely, at a much lower and more indistinct level than my connection to Williams and Harris. I focus on my sense of purpose and for one long moment that is all that exists in the world.

Then contact breaks and it is over. I open my eyes. Persephone is backing away weaving slightly, her own eyes still closed.

"Yes," she says, "That was it..." She stops and opens her eyes. "I will go reestablish the link now. Be ready."

She leaves the room after one last look towards me. The door shuts behind her. From my brief connection with her I know she is telling the truth when she says she will help me to leave. I just have to hope the Merovingian isn't paying too close attention.

My link to the agency comes back on in full, like a sudden influx of the sea running up and covering over an isolated tide pool. I jump quickly out of this host and back into the greater web of the matrix.

I don't just go into the first host I can find, but first try and figure out where I am. That answer comes quickly. I am somewhere near a large mansion in Beverly Hills. I try to get back to the agency in San Francisco, but something blocks me.

A search sweeps over me, and I know the local agents in southern California have found me. I locate their headquarters, and transfer to a host there. The host I transferred into is standing in the lobby of the Southern California Sector agency headquarters. It is all but identical to my sector's building. My sunglasses and gun have reappeared in their proper places with the transfer, as they should.

My head turns towards the main part of the building as three agents walk into the lobby, coming straight towards me. I recognize them from one of the files in my database, of course. They seem relieved.

"Agent Lee? You were out of contact." says the one in the lead. His name is Agent Jones, no relation to the one in the movie.

"Yes. The Merovingian was attempting to hold me prisoner. Persephone aided me in escaping."

His eyebrow rises slightly in response. "We are arranging a deletion attempt on the Merovingian in response to your capture. You will want transport back to your sector."

"Yes." Nothing more needs to be said. We are all connected, and I hide nothing of my experience. Aside from a serious attempt on Merv's life, there will be an involved mission to get the device I was captured with. It is apparently a new creation by someone in the Merovingian's group, as the agents have never encountered anything quite like it. Something like that can not be allowed to get out into the general exile, and especially the rebel populations.

I follow the other agents into the agency. Jones stops at a backdoor access point and unlocks it. I follow him in. The other two agents do not come with us. We walk along the passageway. It feels different back here than during the time I came through before. After a minute or so we stop at one of the doors. This one connects the backdoors for the North and South California sectors and requires a submaster key to get through.

It is almost strange to see one of these doors just open onto another hallway. This hallway, I know even better than the one I just came down, as knowledge about it is in my own files. I walk through; Jones doesn't. I nod in acknowledgement to him as he shuts the door, and proceed directly to the door that opens onto my building.

Williams and Harris are waiting there for me. I'm radiating relief as I step through the door.

Am I in trouble? I say. They know I'm thinking it, after all, just as I know they're glad I'm back and in contact. They were just as disconcerted by loosing their link to me as I was in loosing my link to them.

No, says Williams, These events were unforeseen. You should take time to run an in-depth systems diagnostic, however, to make sure none of your code was corrupted during your... adventure. In addition your experiences will be analyzed to attempt to develop a counter for the device used in that stunt by the Twins and the Merovingian. 

I can assist you, says Harris. As you will have to be taken offline briefly for the procedure. We should begin immediately. 

All right, I say. Harris and I turn and head towards the elevator and to my office. The diagnostic will last about an hour. It can be done anywhere, but I feel most comfortable doing it in my office where I can sit down. Even if I won't be conscious through it.


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Chapter Eleven: A Trip to the Oracle**

For some reason Kami was always extra nervous when she jacked in to the matrix during the day. The harsh light of the sun strips away all sense of anonymity and seems like a spotlight pointing her out to the agents. But she had to go visit the Oracle.

Ajax had deemed her revelation about the agent having the face of her dead friend possibly critically important. After searching futilely through their records and conferring with the other captains, he decided it was a problem worth consulting the Oracle.

Also, it was about time for Sean's first trip back into the matrix, and a chat with the Oracle was traditional. Everybody had come along, but only Ajax, Kami, and Sean were going to the Oracle. The others were busy catching up with little side projects and interests. Kami knew for a fact that Chowder was off picking up a set of the latest DVD releases to take back to the ship and watch in the construct.

The three of them drove along the surface streets towards the Oracle's apartment. Sean was plastered to the window, predictably.

"It just... all seemed so real," he says, as they pass a coffeehouse with someone busking on accordion on the sidewalk in front. "But it's not. Nothing was."

"The people were," says Kami. She remembered Bill Gates. "Most of them, anyway."

"Are we really going to see the Oracle? Like, with cookies and stuff?" Sean says after a while.

"Yes. Cookies and all."

"Huh."

The car pulls into a shady parking lot. The Oracle lives in one of the buildings just off of it. The group walks through the run-down halls and up to her door. Ajax knocks.

Seraph opens the door. Sean makes a little 'guh' noise as he recognizes Seraph.

"Come in," he says. "She has been waiting for you."

Ajax nods in response and gestures for Sean and Kami to go in first. Kami pushes Sean through the door in front of her.

"You first," she says, pointing him in the direction of the kitchen.

Kami waits on the living room couch with Ajax and Seraph while the Oracle talks to Sean. When he comes out, dazed and holding a cookie, she doesn't ask what the Oracle said to him. Tradition, that.

"She— she says to go on in," Sean says in Kami's direction, while staring at the cookie in his hand. Kami jumps to her feet and walks past Sean into the kitchen.

"Hello again, Kami." The Oracle is sitting in her usual chair by the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. "I hear you have a question for me."

"Don't you already know what I'm going to ask you?" Kami sits down in the other chair at the table.

The Oracle chuckles. "Oh, of course I do. I'm just being polite. You want to know why you saw your old friend in agent clothes and shooting at you."

"That wasn't Renee. It has to be some agent trick," Kami said flatly, "Renee's dead. It couldn't have been her." Kami looks away.

"Are you so sure about that? You yourself have a gravestone back in Glendale."

"That's different."

"Is it?" says the Oracle, "Are you an authority on how agents are made?"

"They're just programs." Kami remembers who she is talking to. "I mean, everyone knows they're made or programmed or whatever in the machine world. By the machines. Aren't they?"

The Oracle waves her cigarette in the air. "I'm gonna tell you something. A big secret, that I probably shouldn't be telling you. I think it's time for you to hear it, though."

Kami sits up straight and tries to pay as close attention as possible.

"Most agents are indeed pure programs, made the way you said. But not all."

Kami has a horrible suspicion that she knows where this is going.

"A very, very small number of agents are constructed on a human base. They're still full agents and programs, through and through, but they weren't always."

"Renee," Kami whispers, images of her friend being dragged away against her will and brainwashed or worse running through her mind. "They did this to her?"

"Yes." The Oracle stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray. "Not quite in the way you're thinking about it, though. She was given a choice, and a much more informed choice than you were given, by the way. She made her choice, same as you."

"No. Renee saw the movie. She knew what agents are, what the machines did to humanity. She wouldn't go over to their side."

The Oracle just looks at Kami, smiling slightly. "You'll just have to think about that one, I see. You know, in a way you were right when you came in here and just thought some agent had stolen your friends face."

Kami sits with her head down, trying to follow what the Oracle is saying, but mostly with her mind just running in circles about why it can't be Renee, but it is, but it can't be, ad nauseam.

"She is an agent now," says the Oracle. "Even has a new name. She's a program. Your enemy. Try and remember that, the next time you see her. It might make you feel better." The Oracle shrugs. "Or it might not. Your decision."

"But is it true?" says Kami, trying to get her head around the idea that it was Renee who had chased her and shot at her in that alley.

"It's true, that was an agent you met, yes. The rest is up to you."

"And is that it? There's no way to get her back?"

"Renee is dead, Kami. Even if you could force a red pill down her throat, there is nothing for you to unplug. And I highly doubt you'd be able to overcome her programming forcefully. She made her choice of her own free will. Though she lost that in the process, and so there's no way to take it back. She is an agent, just the same as all the rest. And that's how it is."

"You said something about 'when I meet her again'. When?"

The Oracle shakes her head. "I just know that you will. It's inevitable, I'm afraid."

Kami stands up, troubled. "Thanks, I think."

"A lot to take in, isn't it?" says the Oracle. Kami nods. "Now go on, get out of here. I know you want to go and think about this. Cookie?"

Kami nods, takes a cookie out of habit, says thanks and goodbye, and walks out of the kitchen. Ajax and Sean stand up as she approaches.

"Did you find what you came for?" says Ajax.

"I think so," says Kami. "I still need to think about it. I'll tell you back on the ship."

Ajax nods, and leads the way back out the door and towards the rendezvous.


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Chapter Twelve: Interlude**

I open my eyes. I'm sitting on the couch in my office, Harris in front of me in a chair. The diagnostic is over. I feel all the way back to normal, a great change from the isolated and slowly going crazy me that had been set free.

"Two minor errors were found in your thought processing subprograms," says Harris, "Very likely caused by the stress of your isolation. They have been fixed. In addition, a probable counter for the capture device was discovered and has been added to the antiviral subprograms of all agents."

I am relieved that nothing major was found. Also that there wasn't any lasting affect from Persephone. I'm even more relieved that with the new software, I won't have to worry about being captured again.

I stand up. Now what? 

There are traces of possible rebel activity in the east Bay area. Searches are being run. 

If anything is found, we will go, I say. I feel Harris' assent.

Nothing much happened the rest of the day. In the evening, we were called south to Santa Cruz. There was a disturbance on the university campus. A student was coming very, very close to realizing the truth of the matrix. We were being sent around to give him the choice of staying plugged in or going to Zion.

The rebels had not found this one. If they had, and managed to contact him first, he would be counted among their number. But right now we had a chance and he had a choice.

I transfer together with Harris and Williams south to Santa Cruz, on the north end of town. Williams arranges for a car to be there, through a minor manipulation of the matrix. We get in and drive towards the campus, spread out in the middle of the woods in the hills overlooking town.

I remembered coming here to look at the school, though it seemed like the memories of a different person. Maybe because they were. The school looked the same, though. Scattered buildings on a wide grassy hillside, and further up the redwood forest, blocking the view of most of the buildings. Below us is the sea, and the sun setting to the west.

Harris stops the car on the road below a place I, or maybe she, remembers quite well. On the upper edge of the grassy space the hill grows steeper, and there is a statue. More of a modern art installation, really. A big red squiggle like a few joined "w"s, more than ten feet high, mounted on a concrete base.

Our target had climbed up into one of the curves and was sitting there with his feet dangling a little bit above the concrete, watching the sun set down below the ocean. He either doesn't notice or doesn't care about our arrival. I think it is more probable that he doesn't care. From where he is sitting he could have watched our car drive up from almost the base of the long hill, for maybe the last five minutes.

We all get out and walk towards the target. Harris and I hang back and stop about ten meters down the path and Williams goes on to the base of the squiggle.

"Mr. Madison?" he says, "Could I have a word with you?"

Mr. Madison doesn't give any indication of having heard. The air is still and cool, as the last of the sun disappears behind the clouds at the horizon.

"You know," he says, "Sometimes I get a feeling that I could go to jump down from here and not hit the ground. Just float away." He looks down at the ground, and then jumps. His feet impact heavily, as they should. Mr. Madison looks towards Agent Williams. "So, who are you guys with? FBI, CIA? MIB?" He grins.

Williams shakes his head. "Mr. Madison, we know what you've been doing." He raises an eyebrow. "Seen any white rabbits lately?"

Mr. Madison's eyes widen, and his gaze wanders towards us and then back to Williams. He shuffles backwards a bit. "Oh. Not MIB. The other movie."

Agent Williams nods.

"Uh." Mr. Madison goes to pinch himself. "Is this really happening? Or am I asleep right now?"

"I assure you, this is real. Though in a sense, you are asleep." He pauses. "If you could, would you want to wake up?"

Mr. Madison is too startled to do anything but answer the question. "Uh. This is... I don't know. I never really thought..."

"But you did. Or else we wouldn't be here now."

Mr. Madison turns to look out at the darkening sea. "I did think. But I thought it would be the other guys showing up. Not... agents." He names us cautiously, as if he is afraid that by acknowledging what we are, he will loose his grip on the edge of reality.

"This may have been easier if we had waited another week to contact you, so that you had seen Revolutions and had the full story. But you are ready now." Williams takes a step closer to Mr. Madison. "You can stay here, dreaming this dream. Or you can choose to wake up and find the truth of what is."

"I need to think about it...?"

"No. You have thought about it. We would not be here if you had not. You must decide now."

"Float away..." Mr. Madison mumbles to himself.

He takes a deep breath, and turns to look Agent Williams full in the sunglasses. "I want to wake up. Assuming you guys are really agents and I'm in the matrix and this isn't some stupid gag my roommate put you up to 'cause I'm all obsessed with those movies. I want to wake up."

That was easy, I comment.

Ssh, says Harris. It isn't over. 

Williams nods. I sense some very big and complicated interaction going on between Williams, the boy, and the agency. Final authorization for his sanctioned unplugging. No need for pills of any kind. Then the last commands are sent.

Mr. Madison's eyes widen as he is woken up in his pod. Then his avatar tumbles forwards and drops to the ground as he is unplugged. I request an alteration to it so that when he is found it will appear that Mr. Madison died of an untimely heart attack. Our job here is done.

James Madison didn't quite know what to expect when the agents said they were going to unplug him; but what little he did expect included waking up in a big pink gooey pod, and this is what he got. He reaches up through the gel, trying to blink his eyes clear and failing.

"Ghfkgrl—" He chokes around the breathing tube and scrabbles at it with pale, withered, wired-up arms, trying to comprehend what is happening to him.

He had been in a weird mood up on the hill. Watching the sunset he had all but fallen in to a trance, and in that altered state of consciousness it had seemed natural that the agents had shown up.

James had been a fan of the movies and had often had thoughts about what if the matrix was real. And not just in the sense of 'the matrix is really society telling you what to think and what to do'. He had often hoped green text would spontaneously appear on his computer.

The agents getting to him first had been a surprise. And it was even more of a surprise that they didn't send him home dead or brainwashed, but rather set him free. Or something...

The breathing tube comes up out of his throat and he gags. The air is bitingly cold and tastes like electricity and just a bit like a swamp. It is dark, except for a slight glow coming from the pods around him. The pods.

James slumps against the side of his pod and blinks his eyes, the scum of goop and disuse sliding away. As far as he can see, towers rise towards the clouded sky. The pink pods sprout like strange fruit all along the towers. He pants from exertion, though he has hardly moved since awakening.

Now what? A big hovering robot that looks vaguely like a giant black metal spider slides into his field of view. Oh, that. He doesn't even try to resist as the machine grabs him in its arms and starts drilling at the big plug in the back of his head. It hurts quite a bit, but he just doesn't have the energy to do anything by lie there and take it.

The wires spring off of the many plugs in his body, with twinges like static shocks, and the machine releases its hold on his neck. James whimpers, thinking about what happens next in the movie. He squeezes his eyes shut, preparing to be flushed. But nothing happens. He opens his eyes. The machine is still there. It seems as if it is staring at him.

"What?" he whispers, after a few abortive attempts to find his tongue.

The machine backs up suddenly, and zooms off to somewhere else in what James thinks of as the power plant. He hears something coming from above, with a sound he has never heard before. It sounded a little bit like the sound effects from the movies, but much more... real. Which made sense, because it was.

Or James was going crazy. There was always that possibility. But James had always had a very laid back approach to life, and so figured if he was indeed going crazy and hallucinating all this, he might as well deal with it. True or not, it was here, and so he'd react in the only way possible; by accepting it.

The thing making the weird noise drops into view. It's some big machine that looks a little like a barge. A postmodern, post-human barge designed by Escher on acid.

And there were some... things standing on the barge. The looked vaguely human to James' eyes, at least at first. On closer examination they looked more like the Borg's first cousins. A bit less pasty in the areas that looked like skin and more sleek black metal with fewer protruding wires on the places that weren't. They didn't have any fake, spinney hand attachments either, though one or two had the Doc Oc look going on. These had anywhere from two to six sentinel type arms protruding from their backs.

One of the sentinel-human hybrid looking things was standing at the edge of the barge closest to James, tentacles stretched in his direction. The barge hovers, and the arms reach out and grab James. He is too weak to try and resist, and he probably couldn't have resisted even if he was at full strength. The thing was just too strong.

It lifted up James' limp and naked body and placed it on the barge. He could tell these things were all robotic, now. No trace of human flesh or hair graced their purely artificial bodies. He can't even find the strength to whimper as one of the others kneels down by him and injects something into him with a long needle that extended out of its forefinger. The world goes darker than it is naturally, and James passes out.

He comes to somewhere else. It is much warmer here, though the air still has a metallic bite to it. His cheek is presses against something a little scratchy. Not his own pillow.

James opens his eyes. They feel scratchy, as if he stayed up for much too long and then slept too little. He is looking at a rough stone wall, lit softly by overhead bulbs. _Where am I?, _he thinks.

He tries to find his arms, and succeeds. They feel weaker than normal, but nothing like how he felt back in the pod, an indeterminate length of time ago.

James levers his hands underneath him and pushes against the rough blanket covering the cot he woke up on. After a moment or two he manages to get up into a sitting position. Everything feels just a bit rougher, just a bit more _real_ than it ever did before. He finds he is wearing a roughly knit gown of the hospital variety. It scratches against his skin, but there is some heat to this place so he is not cold, despite the drafty garment.

He blinks his eyes into focus. The room he is in looks like some kind of infirmary or hospital, except the walls and ceiling look like they were carved out of stone. There is a door; he finds when it attracts his attention by opening.

A normal looking woman wearing long pale cream robes that leave her arms bare walks in. She has very short, light blond hair and looks like she is in her thirties. She is followed by one of the humanoid robot creatures like the ones back in that nightmarish scene back in the towers of the power plant. It has glowing red eyes, which does nothing good for James' nerves.

The woman smiles at him. "So you're awake, James. Don't worry, you're all right. My name is Samantha."

James nods uncertainly, eyeing the creature behind her nervously.

It notices his attention. "Hello, James. I am Larry," it, or possibly he, says in a friendly and modulated voice. "I supervised your rehabilitation with Samantha."

Larry? A strange name for such a creature. But thinking further, James couldn't think of any reason he shouldn't be called Larry if he wants to be.

Samantha smiles. "You probably have some questions," she says.

James nods, still unable to take his eyes off of Larry. "That's an understatement," he says, his voice rough from lack of use. Larry chuckles, a surprisingly human sound from such a non-human looking creature. James notices for the first time that Larry has 'hair' made of little metallic dreadlocks, like the tentacles of the sentinels. They move independently, with little metallic clanking noises.

"Uh." He looks around for a blanket or anything to better cover himself with. "Are there any pants around here? And uh, where is here?"

"'Here' is the unplugging recovery infirmary in Zion. And yes we have pants. Would you like some?"

"Yes please," says James. Zion, huh? Guess something pretty important did happen in Revolutions if agents unplug him of his own free will and send him via robot escort to Zion.

Samantha walks over to one of the metal cupboards lining the stone wall and opens one, pulling out a set of loose fitting pants and a long sleeved v-necked shirt, both made of an off-white knit fabric.

"Here you go," she says as she walks over to James' bench and hands the clothes to him. "Standard newbie issue."

James takes them. "Thanks," he says. They feel rough. "Can I uh, put them on now?"

Samantha nods, but doesn't make any motion to leave the room or even turn her back. Well, she did say she supervised his recovery. James had been unconscious through it, but figured rightly that she had plenty of chances to get a look at him, if she wanted to.

James shrugs mentally, and pulls the pants on under the short, open backed robe. The pants have a tie string at the top, kind of like sweatpants. He takes off the robe, and struggles into the knit shirt. It is a little tighter than James is used to. As the sleeves slide over his arms he tries to ignore how it catches against the metal plugs in his skin.

He takes a deep breath of the tinny tasting air and slides off the table to stand on his own two feet for the very first time.

"Okay," says James. "I'm going to try and keep an open mind and assume nothing. So tell me why. Why agents of all things freed me and sent me to Zion, why there's a machine," he nods towards Larry, "here, why all of this is happening to me. Is this real? Or am I going to wake up and find it has all been a dream."

"Oh, this is real," says Larry. "And by the way, you don't need to talk about me like I'm not standing here."

"Sorry," says James. "This is all just a bit of a shock, you know."

The corners of Larry's face pull back into a smile, and he nods. "That is understandable. Samantha, perhaps you would like to explain?"

"Okay," says Samantha. "I'll give it to you as plain and simple as I can. The movies, they're all real. This is really Zion. But the war is over, at least here. Here in Zion, there is peace and coexistence between the two races of man and machine, and there has been for a few hundred years. Those that really and truly desire and choose to be free are unplugged and brought here."

"How many people?" says James.

"Fewer than you'd think," says Samantha.

Larry cuts in. "The population of Zion stays pretty steady at about one hundred thousand humans and ten thousand machines."

"Oh," says James.

"I said the war was over here," says Samantha. "It isn't over everywhere. A handful of years after the Truce between man and machine, a few thousand of the survivors decided the war wasn't over for them and took off on their own. They rejected the Truce, and want nothing but to completely destroy the matrix along with all machine life."

"It is sad," says Larry. "That so many choose to seek out death and destruction rather than to perpetuate understanding and the betterment of our joined future."

James mumbles a line from Reloaded under his breath. _The only way to get there is together._

"And that's true, is it?" says James. "You all are right and the others are wrong?"

Samantha grins lopsidedly. "It isn't anywhere near so black and white as that. If things had unfolded just a little differently, you might have been snatched up by one of the traitor's ships."

Larry cuts in. "But you are here and it is now. If you really want to you can go back. Some do. Most don't. And the traitors don't have that option."

"Only you can say if this was the right thing for you to do," says Samantha. "And only time will tell what you will do."

James nods. "All right, then," he says uncertainly. "How about a, uh, tour?"

Larry smiles broadly. "Right his way," he says.


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Chapter Thirteen: Theta Omega**

Kami spends most of the drive back to the rendezvous point trying to convince herself that the Oracle had made some mistake, and failing utterly. And that would mean it really had been Renee who shot at her. If her friend really was an agent now... Kami just didn't know what to think.

At least Sean seemed happy with what the Oracle had told him. But then, Sean still hasn't quite realized that this is really real. For him everything must seem like levels in a game that can be beat. He hasn't yet seen anyone die, or had to kill anyone because there was a chance they'd get taken over by an agent.

Kami hated that part the most. On her third mission into the matrix an elderly granny-type had accidentally come across her group and Kami had shot and killed her in cold blood. She didn't have a choice.

Well, that wasn't quite true, she amended. She did have a choice. To live or to die. She chose to live, and as a result others died. And that was how things were.

Ajax's cellphone rang. He picks it up.

"Oh, shit," he says conversationally, and slams the gas pedal to the floor.

"What is it?" Kami says, though she knows there is only one thing it could be. Sean cowers in the back seat.

"Agents," says Ajax, "They found Chowder."

"Is he..."

"He's all right. Went to ground, lost them. But they're out in the area and looking real hard. Let's not give them anything to find, all right?"

"Right," says Kami. "We all still heading for the same exit?"

"Yes, except for Chowder. Abdiel's out already, anyway. Just us and Theta still in."

Theta. He better get out safe, thinks Kami, or else he'll have more to worry about from her than the agents.

Ajax throws the wheel to the right suddenly, screeching around a corner and into a less busy side street. "They're out there," he says, and pushes the car to go faster.

"Um..." says Kami, as the car passes a sign saying 'dead end 100 ft'.

"I see it," says Ajax. He brakes hard and fast. "Get out. Sean, come with me. Kami, you're on your own. Head towards the planned exit; it's the only good one for a long ways. Hide if you have to."

Kami nods and pushes the door open, throwing herself out before the car is fully stopped. She doesn't look back as she runs down the street and swerves around the corner of a building.

She cuts across a parking lot and then doubles around, heading towards the exit. A bullet impacts the side of a car near her and she reflexively glances over her shoulder. It's not Renee. But it is an agent, a few hundred meters away.

"Shit," she says, and speeds up, dodging between the rows of parked cars. No looking back.

Rebels in the east bay area. Top priority. All available respond. My fingers pause their typing on the keyboard as the call comes over my earpiece. Miss Sato's group of rebels is in the matrix. In a few different locations. A quick conference with Williams and Harris and we transfer in. I'm not going after Miss Sato, as we want to try and keep the fact that human can be turned into agents as low profile as we can.

My target, Mr. Carino, also known as Theta, is waiting in line at a Starbucks for a caffeine fix. Normally this wouldn't be enough to alert us to his presence, but Starbucks is highly controlled by programs and the elevated priority level on Mr. Carino's crew led us to him.

I take over a body on the sidewalk outside the store and draw my gun. A bell jingles as I open the door and Mr. Carino half turns, sees me and jumps for the other door and is out on the sidewalk and running before I can shoot.

I turn to chase him, letting the door shut behind me. He has a cellphone out and is dialing a number. Good. We can trace that. I put a hand to my earpiece and request a trace, holding my fire for a moment. No sense in killing him now if we can get the location of his ship, and then kill him along with the rest of his crew.

He runs. I follow him, he talks on his phone. The trace is almost complete. He hangs up before it is done. I aim as well as I can, with him running and weaving and me running as well, and shoot. I miss. Too bad.

Mr. Carino turns abruptly left and runs into the street. Cars swerve and horns blare. I run into the traffic after him, but have to stop to avoid getting run down by an eighteen wheeler. I transfer into a host a little bit in front of Mr. Carino in the direction he is running. He starts at my sudden appearance, and then as I draw my gun again (since it reappears back in its holster whenever I transfer bodies) he pulls a gun out even faster and starts spraying lead in my direction.

This forces me to stop trying to shoot him, and dodge the bullets. He screams and runs at me, but I dodge all that he throws at me. He gets a little ways past me, towards his exit, and then his gun click empty. I aim and shoot, but he has already turned into an alley and is running again.

I follow, becoming aware that Williams and Harris are nearing this area from another direction, each chasing rebels. Williams is following their captain and Mr. Levan, and Harris is trailing Miss Sato.

I shoot repeatedly at Mr. Carino, until my own gun is empty. I throw it away, and look for another body to transfer into. There is one, in a building near the one the rebels are all running towards. Williams has dibs on it, though. His target is most important.

Mr. Carino reaches the building and breaks down the front door. I am so close I can almost reach out and grab him. A phone starts to ring on the fourth floor. I jump forward, pushing Mr. Carino down to the tile. I try to put my hands on his head and neck, to try and break it, but he blocks and rolls so that I am underneath him.

He punches out at me. I absorb the blows and then grab his wrist. I brace against the floor and twist, throwing him over my head and into a support column of the office lobby we are fighting in. He cracks his head and slumps to the floor in a daze. I stand up, walk over to him and reach out. His eyes flutter and clear, looking up at me in terror. Before he can struggle I quickly and professionally break his neck with my bare hands.

Mr. Carino dies. My first kill. It feels good, doing what I'm meant to do.

As this happens I am peripherally aware of Harris chasing Miss Sato in through the main door. She stumbles as she sees me, standing over the body of Mr. Carino. But she recovers and runs on. I turn and chase with Harris, but she is too fast and I am all out of guns.

I walk up to the now silent phone. Harris is standing there, staring at it.

"She got out," I say. Nothing like a classic line.

"It doesn't matter," says Harris. Elsewhere, the chase has quieted down.

Their captain and Mr. Levan have managed to hide off somewhere, says Williams. There is a search running. 

Return to the agency? I ask.

You got it, says Williams.

Kami struggles to undo the chair restrains as soon as the needle is pulled from her head jack by Chowder.

"Theta..." she unhooks the last restraint from over her boot and all but runs to his chair. He is still jacked in, but the readout screen says [carrier lost] and the biomonitors are flat. Abdiel is standing by the monitors, head bowed.

"I'm sorry, Kami," she says.

"No," Kami moans, and takes his head in her hands. Her Tears start to run down her face.

"It was an agent..." says Abdiel, "There was nothing..."

Kami knows her eyes are getting all puffed up and red, but she can't stop crying. "Which agent?" she says, through her sobbing gasps. "I was running to fast to get a good look, and you know they all look the same—" They're going to pay. All of them. She didn't know how, but somehow she is going to hurt them, just as much as they hurt her.

"One I've never seen before," says Abdiel. "I watched on the screen, but didn't recognize her code. Must be new."

"Her?" Kami suddenly becomes very still. No. Not her. But it can't be anyone else.

"Yeah," says Abdiel, as she moves from her position by the monitors and heads for the main screens. "Gimmie a minute, I'll pull up the record."

Kami looks down one last time at Theta, feeling like her heart has been carved out, leaving her hollow and dripping. "I'll get that traitor for you," she whispers, touching his cooling hand. "Somehow. I promise."

"Got it," says Abdiel from the main screens. Kami drops her hands to her side and walks away from Theta's body. She is already sure she will know what she will see.

"Right here." Abdiel taps the frozen code on one of the side screens of the main array.

The code is a confirmation of everything Kami feared and suspected.

"It's her," she says, trying to remember what the Oracle had called her, but failing to come up with anything but Renee.

"That one you were going on about?" says Abdiel. "With your friends' face, the thing you went to see the Oracle about?"

Kami nods.

"Harsh. What'd she say, anyway? Anything you can tell me?"

"The Oracle said it's just an agent," says Kami, trying to decide how much she wants to say. "But... she used to be the person that went along with that face. I'm not sure how it works."

Abdiel sucks in her breath. "Weird. Her code isn't any different for that of any of the other agents. But if the Oracle says so..."

"It doesn't matter. She is an agent now, and she killed Theta." Kami pauses for a second. "I want to hurt that agent. I want to hurt her real bad."

Abdiel doesn't say anything, but exchanges a glance with captain Ajax, who had successfully gotten to another exit with the new kid and gotten out without incident. She remembers all the times she's seen people killed, in the many years since she was freed. It's always hard, she knows. And the agents are so impossible to move against. They always come back.

"That... may be difficult," says Ajax, placing a hand on Kami's shoulder. "I know it's hard to loose someone, but it happens. This is the life he chose. He'd want you to go on fighting, not throw your life away in a pointless act of revenge."

Ajax turns Kami around and looks her in the eyes. "We'll win, in the end. But you can't hurt them, no matter what you try. You can't fight them."

"Then I'll find some other way," says Kami. "Somehow, she's gonna pay." She pulls away and runs off towards her room. Ajax and Abdiel exchange uneasy glances. They've never before seen her so focused and hard and remote.

Kami stayed up late, researching the depths of the ships archive on the main screens. When that was exhausted, she turned to examining the main archives of their city through a remote connection, looking for some way you could permanently hurt an agent. She found nothing. Her eyes burned from lack of sleep, though she cried no longer.

Instead she felt hollow inside, as if nothing could hurt her any deeper than she had already been by Theta's death. Even the pain and shock of being unplugged could not compare to this. It was if someone had turned a vacuum on her insides, sucking out anything that didn't deal with revenge.

Articles and records flickered before her tired eyes, as she reviewed everything connected to agents that she could find. There was quite a bit of information. She had dismissed outright the records of members of the resistance lost to agents. No helpful information there, and she certainly didn't want to see Theta's name at the end of the list right now.

Most of the rest was documents chronicling the actions and movements of the agents, with a special section dedicated to individual profiles on all know agents. Most of them didn't have their proper name attached to the file. They were identified by differences in their code, and demeaning nicknames. Also by the people they had killed.

The telephone setup connected to the matrix beeps. Kami doesn't register it at first, as focused on her own research as she is, and since there isn't anyone on the ship plugged in. On the third beep, she jumps, startled out of her research fugue. She glances around, looking for Zip or anyone higher ranking than her, but everyone else is down in the mess hall or their quarters.

Kami reaches over and puts on the headset gingerly. It is not unknown for someone to contact them from another ship through the matrix for aid or to relay a message, and for this reason the ship is hiding out in a hidden spot just within broadcast depth. She hits the command to connect the call to her headset.

"Operator," she says.

"Hello," says a cultured French voice over the line. "I would like to speak with your captain."

"Who is this?" says Kami. She can't place the voice as any member of the resistance she has ever met.

The voice chuckles once. "Tell him this is the Merovingian. I have a proposition for him. And for you, Kami."

Kami pulls back from the screens in surprise as he speaks her name.

"Uh, yeah," she says, "Just a second." She rips off the headset and runs through the ship and down the ladder to the mess hall. The captain is in there, playing some card game with Chowder and Zip on a set of handmade cards one of the other captains made him for his birthday. The birthday in question was the date he was freed from the matrix, and not the day he was 'born'. A little tradition handed down through many generations of the resistance.

"Ajax," Kami says as soon as she bursts through the door, "You have a phone call." The captain looks up questioningly, knowing it can't be from anyone on his ship, as none of them are in the matrix. Kami continues. "From the Merovingian."

Ajax jumps up and tosses his hand of cards down on the table at this revelation. "What does he want?" Ajax asks Kami, walking quickly through the ship towards the main screen setup. Zip and Chowder follow along behind with Kami, and so does Sean, who had been hanging out in a corner of the mess hall taking a bit of a nap until Kami interrupted him with the door banging open.

"To talk to you," says Kami, as Ajax sits down in the Operator chair. "I didn't ask what about, since I thought I should get you and let you know right away."

Ajax nods as he slips on the headset. "Hello," he says, "This is Captain Ajax."

"Why hello, Telemonian, isn't it?" says the Merovingian to Ajax.

"Yes," says Ajax. "Why have you contacted us and how did you get this number?" he says, trying to not be distracted by what the Merovingian knows about him, even if it is just his name's roots.

"As to the second question, let us just say that I have my sources," says the Merovingian. "And as for the first, it seems as if you and I have a common enemy. There was a tragedy on your ship lately, was there not? Involving the young Miss Kami and her friend and an agent?"

"What," the captain says levelly, "Do you want?"

"I want many things, my dear captain," there is a smug pause, and then the Merovingian continues. "I want the same thing the young Kami wants. To hurt that one new agent."

"Go on," says Ajax.

"None of you are the One, you alone can do nothing to hurt an agent. But with my help, there is some hope for your young friend Kami's desire for revenge. I have been working on a device, a weapon against agents. I may give this to you, if I can find enough reason to."

"Why come to us?" says Ajax. "You have this weapon, you have plenty of subordinates, why don't you just go and get the agent yourself?"

"Alas, I am afraid that is impossible at this time," the Merovingian says smoothly. "I misjudged an effect my actions would have. And so I must come to you. Amusing, is it not?"

"Not really," says Ajax.

"Perhaps so," says the Merovingian. "Nonetheless, here I am, offering you something that could be very useful, should you really go through with your plan against the agents. Well? What do you think? Do you want the weapon or not?"

"What is this weapon?" Ajax asks, trying to keep the Merovingian's way of speaking from ticking him off.

"Ah, the weapon," says the Merovingian. "It is... a capture device. Stick it on an agent and press the button and the agent is sucked into the device. Of course, to use it, one must first get close enough to an agent to touch it with the device, but if you truly want revenge..." he trails off.

"And it works?" says Ajax, already going through in his mind the many situations something like this would have been useful in the past, as a last resort when cornered at the very least.

"Yes, of course," the Merovingian says, sounding a little annoyed. "It does everything I says it does. Have a little trust, captain."

Captain Ajax snorts, but quietly, so the Merovingian doesn't hear and possibly decide to take offense. "All right," he says. "We'll try your weapon. How do we get it?"

"I can transmit the code for it to your ship right now," says the Merovingian. "Just have a file in your construct prepared to accept it."

The captain turns on some of the auxiliary screens and starts typing furiously, preparing an open file for the transfer. He spends quite a bit of extra time firewalling it off from everything but the link to the matrix, just in case. You don't get to be captain by taking stupid risks, though a very occasional stupid chance is all right.

"Okay," the captain says to the Merovingian as he hits the last button to initialize the link. "It's ready."

"Excellent," says the Merovingian. "Here you go. It is a pleasure doing business with you."

"Yeah, whatever," says Ajax.

A dialogue box pops up on one of the screens, asking what to do with a file ready for download. Ajax routes it into the ready slot, watching carefully for any sign of something bad slipping in. The file transfers normally and without incident.

From what Ajax can read, it is just what the Merovingian says it is. He wonders what exactly the Merovingian is getting out of this deal. Ajax knows that 'ol Merv isn't just doing this out of the goodness of his programmed heart.

"Have fun," says the Merovingian, and hangs up.

Ajax closes the link down once the download is complete and takes off the headset, trying to process just what exactly happened. He had never talked with the Merovingian before, though of course he had heard about him. This had been a far too trying month, he thought, wishing vaguely that things were as they were before all this started and that he didn't have to worry about agents kidnapping and brainwashing humans, or Kami's new suicidal revenge wish, or anything of that nature.

"How can we trust him?" says Kami. "He's a program."

"We check out what we got from him," says Zip, as he moves to stand by a screen and pull up the downloaded file's specifications from a safe place beyond the firewall.

"Hmm, interesting," he says after a minute. "As far as I can tell, this thing should do exactly what the Merovingian says it should. It is a weird program, I'll give him that."

"How?" says Kami.

"The code's all kind of twisted around. Like there's more space inside it than there should be. Like nothing I've seen before. But it looks like everything is in order. It's not a virus or anything. Just weird."

"Zip, make a copy of that file and send it in to Zion for some further testing and for distribution, if it does what the Merovingian said it does," says Ajax.

Zip nods. "One copy coming up," he says.

"Strange," says Kami. "So supposing it works like he said it would, why would the Merovingian give us something like this... whatever it is?"

"The only reason I can think of that he would do something like this," says Ajax. "Is that he's desperate. The agents must be getting pretty close to him, and he wants a distraction."

"Then we'll give him one," says Kami. "We have something that just might give us enough of an advantage to fight the agents and win." _And totally destroy that traitorous killer_, she adds to herself.

"This... is a very dangerous idea, Kami," says Ajax. "It doesn't work, we all die. I don't know if I can let you take that risk."

"I have to," says Kami, her face a mask of stone. "This is a chance to really strike back. The agents have killed more of us than just Theta. Many more. If we can hurt them, even just one of them, that is enough. Show 'em we won't take all of this. That we can fight."

"And if you can't and you die?" says Ajax.

"Then I die showing what one person can do against them." Kami says resolutely.

"Not just one," Sean pipes up. "I want to help."

"I will too," says Chowder. "Those agents need to be brought down a peg or two hundred."

Ajax sighs, and looks over at Abdiel. "I suppose you want to do this, too?"

She nods. "And I have a plan, too."

Ajax sighs. "Fine. But I have to stay out of it. If this doesn't work; the agents still can't be allowed to capture me. They can't be allowed the opportunity to get my access codes."

Abdiel nods, satisfied. "That's what I think, too. You staying out means we'll need one more crewman, though. I can talk to Jax on the Nanshe. He owes me a favor, and he also might come along just for the hell of it, 'cause he's that kind of guy." She sighs, and rubs her hands together. "All right, then. This is how we're gonna do it..."


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**Chapter Fourteen: The Amazing Moving Picture Show**

Time passed. The worldwide opening for Revolutions finally came. Harris and I went to an early morning show, though not the crack of dawn zero-hour release. Williams decided to not come, as he was busy with the Southern California agents helping coordinate an attack on the Merovingian.

There was a group of people waiting in line dressed up as rebels. Mostly just by wearing shades and trenchcoats or black PVC like Trinity. Though there was some guy dressed up as Neo with an outfit he obviously spent some time on, and didn't just pick up from the mall. Along with him was a Morpheus wanna-be in a jacket that did look like he got it from the mall. They were all just fans, and not real rebels. I noted one of them had monitoring tags on them, as a potential rebel recruit or release.

This group also had one guy in a black suit and sunglasses and an earpiece made of an old telephone cord and a single earplug, dressed up as an agent. When he saw Harris and me walk up and join the line, wearing our normal outfits, he got a really big grin on his face and came over to say hi.

How should we play this, Lee? You have more experience dealing with humans than I do. Harris asked me as the costumed agent walked towards us real agents.

Act friendly, as one fan of the movies to another, I say, He'll probably write off anything strange as us being in character. 

"Hiya," the agent costumed person says as he nears us. "Those are some seriously sweet costumes. Real accurate."

"Thanks," I say. "Nice to see someone else in a suit."

"It seems like there are many rebels around," Harris continues.

"Yeah," the guy says. "I tried to get two of them—," he points a thumb back over his shoulder towards the main costumed party, "—to dress up as agents so there'd be three of us in suits, but they all wanted to be rebels." He pauses for a moment. "Hey, after the movie we're all going to go to this skate park real close and take some pictures in costume. It would be cool if you two came along, y'know, so there'd be three agents. More impressive, like."

Harris and I swivel our heads in unison to look each other in the eye, quickly weighing the pros and cons of going with them. Pro, it would be fun. Con, we didn't have a car to follow them to the park in as we had transferred directly to the theater. Pro, we could do some covert observation on the one in their group marked as a possible release target.

"Sure," says Harris, still looking at me, "We'll come along."

"It sounds fun," I say, and turn back to the human. "Your name is...?" I already know his name, having done a quick search the moment he started talking to us, but letting him know we knew would not be a good thing for keeping him a happily plugged in little human.

"Oh yeah," he says. "I'm John." His last name is Brown, which I find slightly amusing.

"I'm Lee," I say, and shake his hand.

"Harris," my partner says, and after a slight hesitation also shakes John's hand.

The line starts to move, and someone from the costumed group whistles and waves at John. He looks over his shoulder.

"Oh," he says, "Time to go. You guys want me to save you two some seats down in front?"

"Sure," I say, "That would be great."

John nods, and runs off to join his group as the line moves forward. I see him telling some about us, pointing back at us, and then they are through the door.

We get through a little bit after and move confidently through the dark theater wearing our sunglasses. We find John easily and sit down by him. He, along with the rest of the costumed group, has taken his sunglasses off. He notices we have ours on still.

"Hey, aren't you gonna take those off?" he says.

"No," Harris says.

Harris, that would be a bit of a giveaway, I say hurriedly over our link. "Oh yeah," I say out loud, carefully reaching up and removing my sunglasses. I feel partially naked without them, but leaving them on would attract more attention than I want. Take them off, Harris. "It is kind of dark in here."

Harris takes his own sunglasses off, though a little grumpily as he doesn't quite understand why I am so insistent about this. He does it though, bowing to my greater expertise dealing with humans.

John involuntarily pulls back a little when he sees my eyes. There's just something about an agent's eyes that freaks out humans. Maybe it's the look of knowing too much, maybe they sense that we have killed far too many of their kind.

"Uh, yeah," says John uneasily, "It is." He is thankfully distracted by the lights dimming even further, and the first of the previews coming on. There is scattered applause and hooting in the theater. There is even more applause as the Warner Brothers logo comes up and turns green. Harris and I stay still.

I sit enthralled as the movie plays, though making sure to react properly in the appropriate spots. During the big fight in Zion, Harris sneakily puts his sunglasses back on. I follow his lead. It's really just more comfortable to have them on. Everyone else is too glued to the screen to notice the two agents down in the front section. Even John, sitting next to us.

All too soon the end credits roll, and I sit there, trying to absorb everything I saw, and reconciling it with everything I know. I can now access everything in my history files without trouble, I realize. Everything is tying itself together and falling into place. The movies truly are a history of the matrix, with only a few slight changes for style and understandability. Because of that, I'm betting it will infuriate quite a few people.

John slumps back in his seat. "Holy craaap," he says. "That was... something."

"Did you like it?" I ask.

"I— I don't know yet," he says. "Is it really over? Did you see that sunrise? It was all colors and there wasn't really any green and the sky was blue—" He stops babbling and shakes his head to clear it as the credits end and house lights come up.

The rest of the costumed group gets up, talking loudly among themselves about the movie. It ended up that about a quarter liked it and about two thirds loathed it, with a few, like John, needing to think about it some more.

Harris and I follow John following the group out of the theater.

"We're all meeting up at the park a few blocks north of here," says John once we come out of the theater and stand on the sidewalk in front of it. Almost everyone has their sunglasses back on, and they all are still arguing about whether the movie rocked or sucked. There are strong feelings on both sides.

"All right," I say.

"We will meet you there," says Harris. We turn and walk away, around the corner of the building towards the parking lot and ostensibly towards our car. But once we are out of sight of the humans, Harris and I transfer away to hosts near to the park.

We wait there for some time. Eventually the costumed group shows up, caravanning in a few cars. They have lost a few of their group, mostly the people who were vehemently expressing their hatred of the final movie. They have also picked up a guy in street clothes carrying a fancy digital camera.

John gets out of one of the cars and waves to us. Harris and I walk over to him.

"Hey Lee, Harris. You guys got any prop guns on you? 'Cause I have this replica one I got off of ebay and we could do some pics like from the first movie if you guys have some."

Harris and I confer quickly about pros and cons again, and then in unison we reach into our jackets and draw our guns. John's eyes widen as he sees them.

"Jeez. You guys really went all out with those costumes. Those things look really real. Where'd you get them? Can I see one?"

"No," Harris says quickly.

Harris, I say to him privately, Let me answer the questions, OK? 

That human is not touching my gun, says Harris. And I am designed to interact with law enforcement and government humans, remember? 

Yes, I say, Sorry. But this human is just a civilian. They don't work like government types do. And I remember quite a bit about interacting with civilian humans from when I was one for twenty years. 

All right, says Harris. You can answer the stupid questions. 

This conversation is conducted fast enough that John only waits through a very slight pause before I say, "They look real because they are." I smile, but not with my eyes, though that's okay because I have my sunglasses on. "I have an uncle who runs a gun shop. These are loaners."

"Huh. That's pretty cool. Isn't that illegal or something, though?" John has a slightly puzzled look on his face through this, but it clears up pretty quick. Mostly because an agent's speech has special code tags connected to them that make plugged-in humans accept what we say with very little questioning. Though it works better on those used to obeying commands, such as the humans Harris usually works with. Which in turn is why he is having a bit of a problem conversing with John.

I smile for real. "Not for us." The comply and conform command kick in and the last of John's doubts evaporate. This happens mostly because John is a happy little plugged in battery. If I had been talking to the one in this group marked for observation (he was still in the group, and was complaining about parts of the movie like the lack of ending, which upgraded his watch status with us) I probably would have faced more questioning and resistance.

John blinks, our coded command having interrupted his train of thought.

"Oh," he says, and shakes his head. Conversations with an agent can be confusing. "I think they're ready to take some pictures, now."

They are. John takes us over and introduces us to the group and we go around saying our names and shaking hands of all the humans dressed as rebels. The one on watch as potential rebel or release seems a little jumpy around us, which is understandable, really. He sees us a bit more for what we really are, at some level, and it freaks him out.

The photographer guy takes over. This is mainly a shoot to just have fun with the costumes, but not totally. One of the dressed up rebel types writes fanfiction, and got the idea to illustrate some of his works with photographs. This was mainly why John had pulled us out of the crowd to come help out, as there were three agents in the stories but they only had one willing to dress up in a suit and be the bad guy.

The fanfiction we were going to help illustrate was of the basic battery is freed, joins a ship, has interesting adventures fighting against the agents variety. The only real twist is that in the last of the series, his rebel captain girlfriend is captured by agents and he tries to save her and fails. She dies, he tries to fight the agents and dies, and everyone dies. Realistic, at least.

The photographer starts off with some group and individual shots, just taking pictures. Then we start in on the fanfic illustration photos. The guy who wrote the story tells us what to do like a director, having us get into specific fighting positions against someone dressed up as the main character and his girlfriend.

He also experiments with taking a dodging bullets shot, by taking the same shot over with me and the non-agent John in different positions, intending to mess around with the various photos in Photoshop to make them one. If I still had the drives my previous self did, I would have had to fight myself to resist moving at bullet dodging speed here, to freak them all out. But I'm a good, well behaved agent and so I don't.

This goes on for some time, Harris and John and me posing for the pictures with the costumed rebels. And then Harris and I pick up a disturbance. Our hands go to our earpieces and we twist around to look north. A group of rebels is trying to blow up a theater that's doing a special triple showing of the original Matrix movie, Reloaded, and Revolutions. We have no idea why the rebels are doing this, whether they are trying to suppress the movies or promote them. And frankly it doesn't matter. This event will be suppressed, no matter what happens. The general public will be oblivious to it, as they are to almost all interactions between the rebels and the agents. The call goes out for all local agents to respond immediately.

Harris and I transfer out of the park and straight to the theater, in such a hurry that we don't bother to even get out of view of the humans before transferring hosts. It is more important that we get to the agency right this instant, even with the at-risk for release or recruitment person standing right next to us.

"Uh, guys?" says John, staring at the two confused looking people that appeared where Lee and Harris had been standing, and who were currently trying to figure out just how they got there with no memory of how they ended up standing by a group of people wearing way too much leather. "Did you see that?"

"See what?" says Mike, the guy costumed as Neo, as he stares right along with John at the two people who had appeared when the two agents disappeared.

"Uh, yeah, okay," says John, "Nothing." _Did that really happen?_ John thinks to himself. He had thought their costumes were just a little too good, their actions and speech a little too in character. And they did the morphing thing. Like real agents in the movies.

These thoughts make large enough ripples that a subprogram running in the sector kicks in, and blanks out the last few moments of the wondering people's thoughts, substituting something harmless. John and his group go silent for a moment as their thoughts are altered, and then shake their heads and snap back into it.

"Right," says John, "I think I got distracted or something. Where were we?"

They go back to shooting pictures, and don't think any more of the strangeness until later, when the photographer goes through and edits the files on his computer and finds pictures of more agents than just his friend John. He mentally shrugs, and assumes he just missed meeting them and forgot all about them.

The incident at the theater is cleared up pretty quickly, and with minimal civilian damages. Some theater workers and attendees remember being evacuated because a fire alarm went off, but it was just a false alarm and everything was taken care of by the friendly government officials, though why government officials responded to a false fire alarm gave a few people momentary pause, until they suddenly remembered they had something important that needed doing, if they could just remember what that was.

The effects of the bomb were removed with a quick edit to the matrix. The bodies of the rebels that didn't run fast enough were removed as well, though they were taken off and put into graves that had been occupied by shills for as long as each rebel had been a rebel.

Williams had met us to chase down the rebels at the theater, and I focused on containing and eliminating the bomb and its results. Harris did final cleanup of the memories of the firemen that had been called out, and we transferred back to the agency, to wait for whatever needed our attention next.

There was always something to do, I had found in the first week or so of being an agent. I never go tired of any part of it, though, and also didn't get tired in the usual human sense of the word either. The limits of exhaustion were set so low in an agent's program that they might as well be nonexistent.

So I sat in my office, working on the net, or I patrolled through the streets with Williams and Harris, searching for and fixing glitches, checking up on registered and permitted exiles, watching for unregistered exiles, and just generally being an agent. I hardly ever thought about my old life now. I even thought of Miss Sato as just another rebel in need of termination.

I was happy; doing what I was supposed to do, fulfilling my purpose. I felt as if I could go on like this for ever. And I could, through reload after reload, through the turning of the cycle. As long as I was needed, I would exist and do what I was meant to do.

I did my job, my life, and time passed. The days turned into weeks. I noted with surprise the coming of November thirtieth, a day which had my old self not been killed with my transformation into an agent would have been one of frantic writing, working hard to reach my final word count for the novel I had planned to write for the strange event called NaNoWriMo.

I allowed myself a brief moment to smile mentally at that thought. The novel I would have written would have been a big Matrix fanfiction about agents. I might even have done a big stupid self insertion fic, if my life hadn't turned into one of its own accord a few days before the event. It doesn't matter, though. All of that is gone, now, and only the agent remains.

As it was, the day is significant because on November thirtieth rebels attacked the agency.


	15. Chapter Fifteen

**Chapter Fifteen: Things go boom some more **

It is just past dawn. The air outside is so foggy you can hardly see the building across the street. A few early morning walkers stumble through the dim, fog enshrouded streets and the occasional car goes past, but on the whole it is very quiet. The fog seems to muffle all sound, blocking you off and keeping you remote and detached from the world.

I am not remote and detached, though, with my earpiece linkup attached. And I'd never take it off, so I am never remote or detached or alone. I like the feeling, of being connected. Thousands of little details about the world that previously would have gone right by me I now pick up, and all because of my connected to the world. The matrix.

I wonder if I will ever see the 'real world'. I find I don't really care. The matrix is my real world, the world in which I was designed to operate to the best of my parameters. I am a sentient program, and so presumably that program could be downloaded into some sort of machine body in the outside world, if the situation required it. I would almost prefer if that would never happen, though. This is my world, and I like it that way.

I request a coffee, sent up by a human runner and employee of the agency. A double latte, from a Starbucks in a building just across the intersection. I may not technically need it to wake up, since I never sleep, but a caffeine fix in the morning is a hard habit to break. I'm not addicted to the caffeine, no agent is allowed to have such weakness as an addiction in their program, but I still like to drink the occasional latte.

The human runner knocks on my door. I get up and open it, taking my coffee with a brief 'thank you', to the tired looking girl, on internship from one of the local colleges, most likely. I reflect momentarily that a few short weeks ago I had been much like her. Though, I like to think that I had better clothes sense. And taste in books, I realize as I access the human worker's records, out of curiosity. I used to be something like her. Things were different now. Now, I was different.

For one, I looked just a bit older now. I looked an age such that it was impossible to guess my true age. My experiences have aged me, though mentally much more so than physically. I don't really age at all physically, as my physical program is of course reset each time I transfer hosts.

I stop this train of thought, and switch to a new one as I sip my coffee and do my work on the internet. I check the current agency files on the Merovingian. He has been the subject of a major crackdown this month, and I have been following the news of the battles between him and the agency.

The fires that had swept through parts of the Southern California Sector were partially a result of those battles. They destroyed a number of the Merovingian's holdings, placing him on at least partially shaky ground with the human authorities in the area. He had lots of holdings, and money, and supplies, under a number of different aliases. We were aiming to make it difficult for some of his aliases, and thus himself.

I allowed myself a thin smile as I read of the meetings between the lead agent, Jones, and the twins. Lots of damage all around. But the Merovingian and his lackeys take the damage harder. Though not without quite a bit of civilian casualties. This operation would continue until the cost in casualties outweighs the damage done to the Merovingian. It hasn't, yet, and so the battles continue.

High in the building across the street, in a block of offices not yet open, Sean sits getting a rocket launcher ready to fire. He crouched down below the window and behind the desk in the office, hoping no one has decided to come into work early this morning and surprise him.

Sean still hasn't got used to the idea of shooting on sight anyone who has the bad luck to come across him while he's in the matrix. He has seen many people die in the last month, and has had enough close calls with agents both in training simulations and in the real matrix to reflexively shoot on sigh. He hates doing it, but does it anyway. It's better than dying.

The first time Sean actually shot someone in the matrix he threw up afterwards. It was a nighttime run and a late partier had seen them, and recognized the captain from America's Most Wanted, or something, and had started shouting. The training taught Sean that that was exactly the type of situation likely to attract an agent. So Sean had put three metal slugs in the man's belly. He whispered 'sorry' as they ran for it, but it didn't help.

Sean keeps telling himself that it is self defense, pure and simple. Kill them before they become agents and kill you. This doesn't help either. So Sean just turns off his feelings, or locks them away, or something, and does what he has to do, all the while telling himself that it is for the best. He is working for a cause. And someday, if they are lucky, that cause will prevail and everyone would be freed and the machines would all die and he wouldn't have to kill anyone ever again.

Sean finishes loading and preparing the rocket launcher and brings it to bear on his shoulder, propping the end of it on the edge of the window sill. Earlier he had slid open the window, so that it wouldn't break and shatter distractingly all over him when he fired. He picks out a target, a particular window on the third floor, and waits.

The blueprints of the building that Zip found show the room he is aiming at, with his second shot, is a big conference room. His first target is the lobby, to block off some exits from the building and entry for mundane police and possibly National Guard should they be called in. Zip could just as easily have pinpointed the agents' positions in the building and had him aim for them, but killing them once like that wouldn't be any help, and would even be dangerous as the agents would re-spawn somewhere else and there would be a delay between their reappearance and Zip's letting everyone know where they were.

Delays could be deadly. That was another thing Sean had learned in training.

His cellphone is laid out on the floor beside him. Sean listens for the single ring that will tell him everyone is in position and ready, his finger held carefully to one side of the trigger.

He hears the dull throbbing noise of an approaching helicopter. That means Abdiel has held up her part of the plan. Sure, the use of a helicopter in an assault on the agents was cliché, both in the movie and with the real life resistance, but they were going to use one anyway. Some things became cliché because they worked. That did mean the agents expected an attack by helicopter and knew how to respond, of course. But it still worked well to draw attention.

The phone rings once. Sean lays his finger on the trigger, aims at the first of his chosen targets, and squeezes.

Abdiel picks up a helicopter with built-in really big gun in the construct, and then Zip loads her and the helicopter into the matrix proper to pick up Jax. He is waiting on a rooftop right next to where the helicopter appears, a few blocks from the agent's building, and sprints for the side door of the chopper as Abdiel starts it up.

"Hey, Jax," Abdiel, yells over the noise of the rotors as he climbs in and takes his place behind the big gun, "Thanks again for doing this."

"No problem," Jax yells back, and then puts the headset with ear protection and radio to Abdiel on over his spiked yellow hair. "My ship's stuck doing basic patrol and recruit search in Cleveland," he continues in a more normal voice over the radio, "There's absolutely nothing happening there. I was going crazy from the lack of action. This'll be _fun_." Jax grins manically.

"I hope so," says Abdiel, and pulls the helicopter up and off of the roof. "Let's go and get 'em."

She pilots the chopper straight towards the agency building. She gets a visual of it and right on cue, the front lobby explodes. Sean with his rocket propelled grenade launcher, getting the agent's attention. Another grenade arches across the street and explodes against the building, blowing out a gaping hole. Abdiel stays well above the building next door, out of danger from Sean's grenades. Jax lets off a few rounds towards the agent's building, letting the agents know they are there and waiting for some action. They are not disappointed.

Three agents burst out of the building below them and onto the roof. Abdiel wheels the helicopter around to give Jax a better shot.

"Wahoo!" Jax yells as he squeezes the trigger, sending round after round towards the agents, forcing them to move fast to avoid the constant hail of bullets.

"Got one!" he screams as one of the agents jerks and falls to the roof, blood spraying from its chest. As it hits the roof, the agent reverts with crackling green light to the form of some random and stone dead person.

The other two agents are behind cover now, and firing at the helicopter. Abdiel twists it around to make for a harder target and takes off away from the agent's building. Jax keeps firing, both at the agents and at any random person he sees on the street below that might turn into an agent.

The agents give chase, as Abdiel knew they would. She carefully regulates the speed of the chopper, letting them stay close, but not too close, looking for that perfect distance to incite them to keep trailing her.

"There's four now," Jax says over their intercom, keeping up a steady stream of bullets spraying down towards the agents. He smiles wildly. This is _much_ better than monitoring message boards or running around Cleveland.

"Good," Abdiel says through gritted teeth, "That's four less that Kami and Chowder will have to deal with." She tries to concentrate on her flying, weaving in and out of the San Francisco skyscrapers just above their rooftops. The agents follow, leaping from roof to roof, occasionally firing at the chopper, but more often getting fired at by Jax. He hits them once in a while, Abdiel knows, as he yells some noisy variant of 'wahoo' through the intercom each time. More often, he hits unlucky pod people who are unfortunate enough to be in the area.

After five or six blocks of this, the agents manage to shoot out a critical part of the hydraulics system. Emergency lights show red on the control board and sirens blare in the cockpit.

"We're goin' down," yells Abdiel. "Get ready to ditch!"

"Got it," says Jax, steadying himself against the machine gun as the helicopter weaves and shudders.

Abdiel sets the helicopter on a downward path towards the bay, and climbs back into the main bay with Jax. The leap from the helicopter onto the roof of a building, thankfully one without agents on it. Abdiel rolls and comes back up on her feet, quickly getting her bearings. The helicopter crashes into the bay, straight into an expensive looking sailboat which promptly bursts into flames and sinks.

Jax already has his cellphone out, talking with the operator on his ship and getting the location of an exit. He gives Abdiel a thumbs up.

"See ya," he yells, taking off running. The plan, which so far is going perfectly for them at least, calls for the two of them to split up once the helicopter is down and further give the agents more targets to chase.

Abdiel waves, taking out her own cellphone and calling Zip.

"Operator," she hears over the phone.

"It's me," she says, scanning for agents.

"Hey, Abdiel. Nice flying. Got the planned exit all ready for you. You got two agents on your tail, across the street and moving in your direction."

"Got it," she says. "See you on the other side." She clicks off the phone, takes out her gun, and runs for it.

Kami waits with Chowder on the roof of an adjoining building, cellphone out and in her leather gloved hand. She and Chowder are staying under the cover of a large air conditioning unit, waiting for the signal.

She grips the anti-agent device on one of its edges in her other hand, holding it tight to her chest. She, and the rest of her crew, still wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to do, despite the thorough working over Zip and Ajax had given it.

They had examined it first very thoroughly as code on the computer screens of the ship. Finding nothing dangerous, to humans at least, they had loaded up Abdiel into the construct with it to check it out. Nothing bad had happened to her. It was obvious how it worked; there was one large red button to push when an agent came in range. There was a little red light to show when an agent was in range.

Other than that, it was pretty boring. Abdiel wasn't able to get it to do anything in the construct by itself. Zip had then loaded up their training agent, made from the stripped down code of one of the real agents, which was carefully made to be non-sentient and not truly dangerous.

When the training agent appeared the light had started blinking red, and so Abdiel pushed the button. Nothing happened, at least at first. And then the training agent went into a spasm and dropped to the floor, its code degrading.

Zip was a little pissed that they had broken their simulated agent, but everyone else was somewhere between ecstatic and not really believing it. They hoped that it worked on a true agent as well as it did on their stripped-down version of one.

Attempts to copy and past the device didn't really work. The resulting pasted device's code was corrupt and the device itself didn't work. At least, the light didn't come on when Zip had initialized another copy of their training agent file.

This meant that they would only have one real weapon against the agents. Some bad language resulted from this revelation, mostly directed at the Merovingian. Zip suspected some kind of copy protection, but couldn't isolate any of the code that might have been causing the disruption in the copy and paste attempts.

Their plan for attack, which was mostly Kami's and Ajax's plan, was built around this device working as it was supposed to. This was to be a quick strike, with a very clear objective. Once that objective as attained, everyone was to get the hell out of there and away from the agents as fast as they could.

Kami's main objective was to get revenge, whenever and however she could. Everything else was of no consequence, aside from ensuring none of the rest of her crew died. Theta had been the closest anyone had ever gotten to her, but right behind him in that ranking was Ajax, Abdiel, Chowder, Zip, and recently even Sean. She was ready to give her own life to save theirs, if she could. And as long as she could get revenge first.

Ajax had to twist her arm quite a bit to get her to agree to the condition that if she encountered some other agent first, she would just use the device on it and get the hell out of there. Only after that did he finally go along with her idea.

She stares intently at their target building, the stronghold of the agents. She is ready, ready to get in there and kill every last one of them as many times as she can. Especially Renee. What did the Oracle call her, again? Kami tries to remember. L-something. Lee. That's it. Kami dismisses that thought. When she sees her, Kami will call her Renee. She has to know if there is anything of Renee at all left in that cold shell of a killer.

A program. Kami still can't get over it. Why did she do it? It was beyond anything Kami could imagine that a human being could willingly go over to the side of the machines. And especially that one could become an agent.

She must not have understood. She must have been forced into it, or tricked, or something along those lines. Kami just couldn't believe Renee of all people would freely do that. Renee had always been such a hippie tree hugger freedom lover type. Always mad at the government, no matter who was in power. And now she is a program designed to keep humankind penned up and docile like so much cattle destined for the slaughterhouse.

Kami's cellphone rings once in her hand, startling her out of her dark thoughts.

"You ready?" says Chowder.

Kami nods once as she clips the cellphone to her belt and watches for the explosion, proof that Sean has succeeded in his role.

Fire blossoms from the middle lower front of the building, spreading petals of flame and raining debris down on to the road and early morning traffic below.

"Let's go," says Kami. She takes a deep breath, and Chowder and she sprints out from behind the air conditioning unit and towards the edge of the roof.

Kami keeps her eyes on the roof of the next building, concentrating and trying to focus on the unreality of the matrix and that because of that what she was about to do was indeed possible.

She leapt off the roof and the world seemed to move around her, rearranging itself so that she did not move but the roof of the agents headquarters maneuvered itself to land under her feet. Beside her, Chowder made the jump just as easily.

It was true what they said in the movie about the first jump. Kami fell her first time, as did everyone she had ever met, along with everyone she had ever heard of. She also fell the next twelve times. On the thirteenth she managed to put herself through a window on the building she was aiming at. The resulting lack of totally shredded skin from the glass somehow made her realize at some level that this was, indeed, fake. The next try, she made it all the way to the next roof. After that, she only missed if she was unable to concentrate the amount needed to overcome the rules of the matrix.

Kami and Chowder land on the roof with perfect form. They run straight past the helipad and towards the roof elevator and stairs.

Sean frantically reloads with trembling fingers. That last grenade killed some people, he thinks. He heard some screams, at least, even from his high window. The sounds of the helicopter have diminished, but not in a way that sounds like a sudden crash. That means the plan is working.

He is sure the agents are coming, but just wants to get this one last shot off. He tries to load up the weapon faster, but drops the grenade. It clatters on the floor and rolls a little ways away.

"Dammit," he mutters, and grabs it back up. At least it didn't explode right here in his face. He finally manages to stuff it in its proper place and picks the rocket powered grenade launcher up and aims.

He arms the weapon and squeezes the trigger. The fourth floor of the agent building explodes from the grenade, just as the door bursts open behind him.

Two agents enter the room, guns drawn. Sean drops his main weapons and jumps into cover behind the desk, fumbling for his own gun.

"Shitshitshit," he says under his breath. He waited too long. Sean turns and fires at the agents, who dodge his shots and fire right back, advancing across the office towards him. Sean is seized with an overwhelming desire to get out of there.

The agents are between him and the door. That means he goes out the window. Sean fires at the agents almost continually and runs for the open window. He throws himself out, trying to keep in mind his training and successful jumps. He twists around midair, getting his feet below him and ready to land.

Above him, one of the agents leans out of the window and fires straight down at Sean. One of the bullets hits.

Sean looses his concentration as pain sharper than anything he has ever felt blossoms in his left shoulder. This distracts him for a crucial second and he looses control of his fall, unable to concentrate on anything but the pain. He slams into the ground as he did the first time he tried the jump program. Unlike in the jump program, the pavement doesn't cushion his fall, but instead stops it abruptly. He splatters messily across the street, and dies instantly.

Above him, the agents each put a hand to their earpiece and transfer out to join the helicopter chase.

Kami and Chowder race towards the stairwell on the roof of the agent's building, guns out and ready. Chowder reaches the door of the stairwell first, and kicks it down, going in first. His job in this is mainly to protect Kami and draw fire from any agents in the building, so she can sneak in behind him and do her work with the device on any agent unlucky enough to be there.

There aren't any agents right there in the stairwell waiting for them, which is a small blessing. But it also means they will have to take longer to actively search for the agents and go to them. Chowder and Kami run down the stairs, jumping from landing to landing.

They ignore the top floors and go deeper into the building in search of agents. From study of the agents here in their building, they know that the higher floors are mostly for show. The main action starts on the eighth floor and on down through the sub-basement levels.

When Kami and Chowder reach the landing for the sixth floor, the door into the building opens. Two agents, one male and one female. Chowder hears Kami curse quietly and extremely fluently, and correctly guesses that the woman agent is the one they're after.

Chowder has had his gun ready since before he jumped on to the roof of this building and now he uses it. The agents blur, dodging the bullets.

One of the agents draws its gun.

"Oh, dammit," says Chowder, and half turns to try and draw it up the stairs after him, to let Kami get a chance to do whatever it is she is going to do with the device and the other agent.

It works. The male agent follows him, and Chowder runs up the stairs, just ahead of the agent's gunfire. He alternately shoots and ducks, pulling this agent's attention away from Kami so that she only has the one to deal with. For now.

Chowder runs out of bullets, before the agent does. He drops his gun and takes a fighting stance on one of the stairway landings.

The agent walks towards him, cracking its neck in preparation for the fight. At the last second, Chowder drops out of his stance and charges up the stairs, pulling out another gun. He knows he is definitely not the one, and isn't about to give up like that. It is certain death to stand and fight an agent. _Which is exactly what Kami is trying to do._ The thought pops into his head and he squashes it. Kami has that thing, that can destroy agents or something. She isn't going to die.

Chowder runs for the roof shooting behind him, the agent following. And gaining. On the twentieth floor, the agent catches up. It reaches out and grabs Chowder's leg, tripping him up and forcing him to fall on the stairs and drop his gun.

_Here we go,_ thinks Chowder, as he kicks out at the agent and pulls his spare gun. He always carries a spare, or three. He twists around and fires at the agent, forcing it to stop what it is doing and dodge the horizontal rain of bullets coming its way. Chowder uses the opportunity to get to his feet and start backing up the stairs, still firing.

With a motion too fast to follow, the agent leaps forward, bullets smashing through its arm in the process, and grabs Chowder's arm. The agent jerks its hands and the gun is forced out of Chowder's hand. The agent keeps twisting and his arm snaps with a sickening crack.

Chowder kicks out at the agent, which absorbs the blow, and then grabs Chowder around the neck with its other hand. The agent lifts him into the air, and Chowder sees his death.

"No," he mouths, no sound coming out. The agent's face is impassive as it lifts Chowder over the side of the staircase railing, to dangle over twenty stories of empty space. The agent twists Chowder's gun out of his hands and brings it around, firing into Chowder's chest. Then he lets go, and Chowder falls to his death, completely unable to move and save himself as any freed mind should be able to do, if they don't have multiple gunshot wounds. But Chowder does, and so he dies.


	16. Chapter Sixteen

**Chapter Sixteen: The Final Fight**

The first indication I, or any of the other agents, have that the agency building is under attack is when a grenade slams into the building lobby, killing our secretary and five guardsmen instantly. I immediately go into full contact rapport mode with Williams and Harris, as we decide what steps to take to combat this threat.

Williams in turn is in contact with the other two team leaders, coordinating who will do what where. And then we notice the helicopter coming in, spraying bullets. One of the other two teams transfers out to deal with that threat, and the third goes off to find whoever has the rocket propelled grenade launcher across the street. As the youngest team, we stay here, putting up emergency patches on the building's code and monitoring at a heightened state the rest of the building.

It is good that we do this, for soon the surveillance cameras hooked into our earpiece network pick up two rebels making their way down the main roof access staircase. Mr. Tate, and Miss Sato. I suddenly pay closer attention and focus in on those two. Miss Sato is carrying something, which looks quite a bit like the capture device the Twins had used on me.

Look, I say to Williams and Harris, pointing out the capture device and communicating nonverbally its connotations at the same time.

It's all right, says Williams, We're all patched for that. 

The other two can feel my relief, even though I don't really mean to share it with them. With the heightened alert and attack in progress, we are much more connected than we even are normally.

They are looking for us, says Harris. Or perhaps for you. He is referring to me, I know. They must know. 

If so, I say, We can take them, easily. 

Yes, says Williams, You two proceed to the stairwell and take them on. Kill them both. He puts a hand to his earpiece. The team chasing the helicopter needs more help. There is a very high priority rebel flying the helicopter. I will go to them and help. He transfers, leaving Harris and me to deal with Mr. Tate and Miss Sato.

The two rebels come right to us. It is the easiest chase I have ever done, if walking down a hall can be called that. We open the door into the stairwell and they open fire. The world seems to slow down as I go into bullet time, dodging everything they throw at me.

I will get Mr. Tate, Harris says to me, showing me his plan at the same time. You take Miss Sato. 

All right, I say. This is it. I know what has to happen, and I am completely prepared to do it.

With a smooth motion we draw our guns in unison, and prepare to fire. This forces the rebels to jump back. The large Mr. Tate retreats up the stairs, while Miss Sato runs down them.

Harris charges upwards after Mr. Tate and I go down the stairs after Miss Sato, firing my gun. She runs and leaps erratically, and none of my shots connect. I put away my gun. No sense in wasting bullets now, without a good host to transfer into. Still she runs holding on tight to the capture device, and occasionally looking back over her shoulder. She turns on a landing, a ferocious grimace on her face, and pulls out a semiautomatic she had kept hidden.

I am forced to stop and dodge the bullets, and she uses the opportunity to walk up the stairs towards me, still firing. I stand my ground and focus on dodging until she's almost at arm's length.

I close the distance between us in a flash, striking a fist down towards her gun. The force wrenches it from her hand and sends it down over the railing.

She leaps towards me, and we smash into each other, tumbling down a half flight of stairs to come to rest on the landing of the second floor. My sunglasses fall off in the tumble, and go flying off the edge of the stairs and fall. The first and third floors are on fire from the grenade attack, and a little bit of smoke leaks into the stairwell making it hazy.

Neither of us are disoriented from the fall. In the second or so before I throw her off of me and get up, she slams the capture device down and presses a button. Time seems to slow down, as if I have entered bullet time. Nothing happens.

Miss Sato makes a little 'ungh?' noise. She presses the button on the capture device on and off furiously, and still nothing happens. Our patch for it works.

And then something does happen. I grab the device from her and crumple it in my hand. I push myself to my feet, borrowing the gravity-defying trick of jumping up that is used in the first movie by Smith, in his fight with Morpheus. One of my little favorite bits, which I now use as much as possible.

Miss Sato scrambles back, away from me, her face twisted into an image of utter devastation. I advance towards her, and pause, looking down at her, curled into the corner of the landing.

I reach out with my left hand and grab where her neck meets her shoulder, pulling her to her feet. I draw back my other hand in a fist and punch her in the face. She winces away and my blow lands on her cheek. This seems to bring her to her senses, and suddenly she starts to try and fight back.

She kicks out. I grab her leg, and slam her into the wall. I do it again, and she goes right through the wall and into the second floor hallway.

I get off the landing and through the door fast, while she is still wondering what just happened. I walk up to Miss Sato, who is lying cut and bleeding on the beige floor, trying to crawl away on a broken knee.

I lean over and pick her up again by the neck, pulling out my gun.

Miss Sato tries to push me away with her unbroken arm, and opens her mouth. "Renee, no," she says weakly. She rallies, and speaks louder. "It's me. Your friend. Remember? Why are you doing this?"

I pause, hand on her neck. She deserves an answer, part of me thinks. The majority of me says to just kill her right now.

"Renee?" she says again, a tiny spark of hope growing in her eyes when I don't kill her right away.

"My name is Lee," I say, keeping my hand on her neck and raising my gun. I stare her in the eyes, my face cold and emotionless, just as it should be.

Kami closes her eyes, hope crumbling into dust. So Renee is truly gone, beyond any chance of revival.

"Do it," she whispers, wanting more than anything for it all to just end, to be over. It has all been in vain. Her great revenge plan failed utterly. She is about to die, and for all she knows the rest of her crew is dead as well. She risked all, and lost just as much.

A sudden emotion envelops her. She wants to just wake up in her bed a few years ago, before anything ever happened, before she saw the movie that consumed her.

I hold back my final strike, sensing a sudden change in Miss Sato's code. Something changed in the last few moments. She had done something. She made a choice. I had thought she had already made her final choice in throwing in with the rebels, but it appears I was wrong. At some level, Miss Sato wants back in.

But she cannot come back in. The red pill doomed her to one fate, and she won't escape it, even with her apparent change of heart. She changed her mind so relatively easily this time and might change it again.

She is contaminated, has gone out of our control, and is to be exterminated. She is part of a story that can have only one ending. I prepare to squeeze the trigger and kill her, but something stops me again.

Harris has come into the hallway behind me, and is staring at the frozen tableau of agent locked in deathgrip with rebel. I communicate rapidly the situation to him, and we quickly come to an agreement on the interpretation of our programming of what we are supposed to do in this situation. It is not our decision to make, at least as the rebels would think of decision making. It is not a decision at all. It is our purpose.

All it takes is a tiny move of my finger. Miss Sato's gasps as I fire three times, using up the rest of my bullets. She blinks once and opens her mouth as if to say something. Instead she goes limp, head lolling to one side. I open my hand and let her slump to the floor.

She is dead. Gone, irretrievably. Harris and I twist our heads to look each other in the eye.

"The rebel has been exterminated, and-" He says, waiting to see if I react in the proper way. He doesn't have to worry. Miss Sato and Renee were friends. Lee and Kami were mortal enemies.

"We have work to do," I say, buttoning my jacket. I lost my sunglasses in the fight, and mussed up my hair a little, but that is all easily restored.

Harris nods in response, reassured that I haven't had my code corrupted by contact with the late Miss Sato.

We turn and walk out of the wrecked office and into the equally damaged hallway, leaving the body where it fell. We do have work to do, repairing the code of the building and restoring it to normal, and dealing with the large number of humans who saw the explosions and battle.

All will be restored. The fires from the explosions are already out; the human witnesses corralled by another team of agents and taken offline briefly as it is determined whether we will use this incident as bad press for the rebels or simply erase the memory.

Harris and I put a hand to our earpiece. Williams has been unable to terminate the two rebels he was chasing, and will be returning to headquarters to help with fixing the code.

We transfer down to the street outside the building to meet him. My sunglasses are back on, my gun is in its proper place, loaded and ready. My suit is still buttoned; whether the jacket is open or not stays constant through transfers. It would be awkward to have to undo it every time to get at your gun in a fast moving chase.

The lobby is almost totally destroyed, along with small sections of the building higher up. The human workers that survived have been evacuated. The building is now ready to reload from backup.

The rebel bodies inside, and the human worker casualties, will be removed with the reload, and the code for their corpses placed in a holding file pending relocation to a cemetery. The two rebels already have graves, somewhere in the matrix. The four humans killed in the explosions and subsequent fires will have to be dealt with. Their death in a car crash or accident fabricated, their families located and notified. New workers will be brought in, and everything will return to normal as if nothing had happened.

Williams walks up, taking in the damage to our building. We have work to do.


	17. Chapter Seventeen

**Epilogue: End and Beginning**

Ajax turns away from the three bodies lying dead and draped in blankets on the cold metal floor of the ship, his hand on his forehead. He agreed to let Kami try her scheme and attack the agents, and it had killed her. He really thought it would work, that was the only reason that mattered when he decided whether or not to let her and the rest of his crew do it. That, and because he knew if he did not let her go, the need for revenge would consume her utterly and the next time she met an agent, she would stand and fight and die. Ajax had thought it better to let her try a planned attack that just might worked. But it didn't. Things went wrong. Sean didn't run when he should have. Chowder and Kami...

Despite all the tests, the device the Merovingian had failed, or perhaps didn't even work at all. It was a risk dealing with the Merovingian, and that risk had caused the death of most of his crew. At least Abbie's part had gone as planned. She was an experienced operative, and had made it to her exit and gotten out all right.

Abdiel comes up beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "It's not your fault," she says. "It's that bastard Merovingian. If he hadn't given us that thing-"

Ajax drops his hand and turns his head away from Abdiel. "No," he says. "If he hadn't, Kami still would have found a way to follow Theta. Though she might have not dragged Chowder and Sean down with her. It might not have been so soon, either. But one way or another, she would have found a way to go up against that agent, and she would have died just the same."

"You don't know that," says Abdiel. "Sean volunteered really quickly to help her out on that— suicide mission. Kami might have found happiness elsewhere."

"No," says Ajax. I've seen this before. In literature. In the history of the resistance. In my own family, from before."

"You were an orphan. I thought all your plugged-in family had died?" Abdiel's voice wavers, against her will.

Ajax nods once, cold and silent. "They did."

Abdiel hadn't lived as long as she had without learning when to drop things. She pulls her hand back, and looks down at the bodies.

"What do we do now?" she asks. "We've lost so many. Where do we go from here?"

"We go back home. There are always new recruits looking to join crews." He pulls away, walking towards the flight deck, ready to go.

"Zip," Ajax calls. "Time to move. We're going home."

Zip has been staying at the main screens and letting his two surviving crewmates have some room. He turns them off now, the auxiliary screens going black, while the three main screens still run with the green code. They stay on always, though they only pick up the code within broadcast depth. He gets up now, and walks towards the copilot's chair. Zip stay quiet, and only looks once towards the three bodies lying covered on the hard metal floor.

The ship comes on, hovering pads glowing blue and crackling as they leave the hiding spot and move through the tunnels, heading down towards their buried city. No one watches them go.

A new day dawns. The building is long since back to normal, the dead human workers have been replaced. I stand at my office window, looking out on the streets. There is very little fog this morning, and it is shaping up to be a beautiful day.

Rebel activity is down as of late, which usually means they are planning something. I do not worry. Whatever they do, we will meet and counter and force them back.

After Miss Sato's attack on the agency and subsequent death, we had gotten the building backup loaded and operational within four hours, and taken about the same amount of time to deal with the bodies. It had taken that long because of the human files and databases that needed to be adjusted in order for bodies to show up and be buried. The two rebel bodies also needed to be moved to different sectors of the matrix, but with the backdoors this didn't take very long at all.

I helped Williams move Miss Sato's body through the white walls of the backdoor hallway, taking her on a gurney back to Tucson.

Agents Miller, Clark, and Davis met us at the main Tucson agency backdoor. I wheel the gurney through the backdoor and into the Arizona sector proper. Miller and Williams lock eyes for a minute, communicating something between team leaders that I'm not privy to.

Lee, says Williams from the hallway, and letting the other agents overhear, You should stay in Tucson for a few hours, and help with the disposal of the body. Miller also wants to have to a talk with you. 

All right, I say to him, letting Miller and the other two hear, as I step clear of the door. Outside of my usual sector, I feel strange. My links to the other agents here seem somewhat different, and also lessened from what I'm accustomed to. Something like the difference between two apartments with identical floor plans and furniture, but with the furniture in slightly different positions. Just strange enough to be a little disorienting.

Also disorienting is that this is where Renee lived. It is strange to see the city for what it is now, with those memories still inside me, though truly separate now that I have lived for some time as an agent and nothing else. I do not let what I was rule me now, and behave as I should, as an agent.

There will be a van from the cemetery along soon to pick up the body, says Miller. There is a casket waiting downstairs for it, as well. 

I nod, and the four of us proceed down the hallway and to the freight elevator.

Welcome back, says Agent Davis.

Thank you, I say back to him. I don't just mean thanks for the welcome, and the three Arizona sector agents know this.

The body is quickly taken downstairs and moved into the coffin, which is then lifted back onto the gurney, ready to go off to the cemetery.

"Lee, come with me," says Miller, after we are through.

I nod again and follow him out of the building's morgue. Clark and Davis stay with the body.

Miller transfers away somewhere and I follow, tracing him since I don't really know where we are going. We end up in a graveyard, though not the one Miss Sato's body will be taken to and interred.

I follow Agent Miller along the rows of graves. He is quiet, hands clasped behind his back. I stay silent as well, wondering why he has brought me here. And then I see the grave marker, and I know.

Why have you brought me here? I ask.

"I thought you should see it," says Miller. He talks out loud much more than any other agent I have met, and about more personal things than is usual to not speak of through direct earpiece link. "It helped me to see mine. Gave a real sense of finality."

The gravestone is a simple granite marker, flat with the earth. It has a name, and two dates, and an age. Along with another line simply containing the words Remember Me. I remember the latter date well, and the former not at all. The latter is October twenty-ninth, two thousand and three. I also recognize the name, of course, as it used to refer to a part of me.

"We went to the funeral," he says, "Clark, Davis, and I. It seemed the least we could do, as we were the ones 'investigating' Renee's death."

"Thank you," I say, succumbing to Miller's habit of speaking out loud. "I'm sure it would have meant a lot to her."

"Third person, eh?" says Miller. "I do that too. I think all of the agents in our situation do. All the ones that passed their test and lasted, anyway."

I remember the night on the highway set, and wonder briefly how many did not make it. I don't bother to ask, as it doesn't really matter to me now since I did pass.

"Those years feel like a dream, now," I say, still looking down at the gravestone. "Especially since my final meeting with Miss Sato. They feel like something that happened to somebody else." I gesture towards the stone. "That isn't me, and I find it difficult now to believe it ever was."

Miller nods. "You are an agent, and will forever be. I am glad you understand."

I hesitate for a moment. "What happened to her family?" I ask. Another thing I could easily look up, but don't really need or perhaps want to.

"They will survive," says Miller. "Tragedy often has the effect of bringing the survivors closer together. And the mainframe has made sure they were compensated for their loss. Standard procedure."

I nod. "That is good," I say. "It would have been a comfort for Renee."

"And for Lee?" says Miller.

"Irrelevant to my function, and easily dismissed," I say quickly, and then pause. "But still comforting."

I turn away from the grave, looking out over the cemetery, past a graveside ceremony taking place, and towards the mountain range in brown and green to the north of the city. The air here is clear and dry, and strangely about the same temperature as it is in the bay area right now. Though it is quite a bit sunnier. My sunglasses are actually useful for their standard purpose, here.

I've seen what I needed to, I say. Do you need my further help here, or should I return to my team? I have work to do. 

There is always work to do, says Miller. He follows my gaze and also turns to look towards the mountains rising above the city. This is all I wanted to show you. You may go. 

I look up at the mountains one last time, and transfer first to the Tucson agency, taking over the same host I walked here from San Francisco. From there I reenter the backdoor hallways and return to my sector and my life.

Harris meets me at the door in.

Are you done with what you were doing? he asks.

Yes, I say, meaning every word to its fullest extent. I am done. 

Harris nods, and we walk down the hallway and towards our offices. The day is still young, and we have much to do.

**The End.**


End file.
